Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

I am not saying you should not ask it again, though.

I very much enjoyed reading the book reviews in the CULTURE section of the Guardian though - but think they could have been far more bilious wrt BERGDORF BLONDES. I admit I didn't read any reviews which took up a whole page ftb I was very very hungover and the print was jumping about in front of my eyes (not in a good way).

I like the LRB
Because if you're me
The LRB's free

Because some bloke I live with is always subscribed to it. It is the real reason I don't live alone.

ha ha! that is perfect. My bloke bought me a Granta subscription several years ago, and that always keeps him in my good graces.
TLS or LRB - in America, it's hard to find either. I haven't tried, but are they available on line? I read the NYT book review and shall be receiving the NYRB soon.
I find it amazing that all you/us posters have time to read reviews as well as books. Sometimes I get completely befuddled by reading a review of a book by an author of a book that I wanted to read. Does that make sense?

Is the LRB's bookshop still in business?

Most people I know get their LRB in the post, so availability isn't really an issue.

Gregory, dish!

Can you name any other independent bookstores that've opened in the past 3-4 years? God bless 'em, but I'm not sure how they do it.

The TLS is the Times Literary Supplement, Carol.

There's free stuff to read on both of 'em, and it's often really good.
I'm just glad they're both there, but major props to whichever one had James Wood review Elizabeth Costello; I haven't even read it yet, but that article has been one of the highlights of my year.
Um, yeah. Must get out of the library more often...

I have!

I want to know what you said, eg about underrated and overrated writers!

Maybe it is not available in the Republic of Letters, I mean, Ireland.

Underrated: Norman Rush.
Overrated: Ian McEwan.

Given how critical I've been of Colm Toibin, it is fair to say: his recent LRB review of Thom Gunn is one of the better critical pieces I can ever remember reading from him. He knows the poetry, compares collections, makes it personal without being too self-indulgent.

Very good:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n15/john-henry-jones/diary

It is.

Another wonderful Katherine Rundell
https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n13/katherine-rundell/consider-the-hare

"And it highlighted the fact that over the 10-year period, the London Review of Books did not publish a single review of a non-white poetry book, or the writing of a single non-white poetry critic. A total of 105 poetry articles by 39 poetry critics were published by the LRB over this period.

“All 39 were white. Those 105 articles reviewed 127 different books and all were by white poets,” says the report. “No other magazine in the UK has published more articles without a single non-white critic. It is the only magazine in our data set to have never published a review of a non-white poet.”

The Ledbury analysis points out that since 2009, eight non-white poets have won the UK’s major poetry awards, the TS Eliot and the Forward prize, including Derek Walcott, Claudia Rankine and Ocean Vuong. “The LRB has reviewed none of these,” it says."

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/25/diversity-in-poetry-on-the-rise-but-resistance-to-inclusivity-remains?

As July begins, I have reached the first LRB of May.

Still reading articles about the pandemic from the beginnings or first half of its duration thus far. It felt more dramatic then.

The poetry that gets printed by the lrb is generally from a very small number of poets (Anne Carson, John Ashbery (rip) August klienzahler, Rae armantrout) some I love (eg the first two) some I quite dislike (the second two). But like the rest of what they publish its for the mostpart from within a very narrowly defined cultural milieu. Hard to even imagine them going as off-piste to include more experimental contemporaries of armantrout (Susan howe say). In part the narrowness of the lrb is part of what can make it good. The article they published about Theresa may is one of my favourite and it's insights only make sense from within the same parochial 'i went to Oxford' perspective that unites their core staff. Patricia Lockwood is a real oddity and her regular articles delight in contrasting with a house style that can feel oppressively uniform in its tics. It says something of what is so simultaneously monstrous and refreshing about the lrb that its obvious that reflecting greater 'diversity' wouldn't even occur to them.

I think I'll never catch up.

But then I think: I won't bother reading Jacqueline Rose. And I don't need to bother with this preposterously long, utterly typical Colm Toibin article about letters that Robert Lowell wrote about having an affair.

Lol I remember that one. I couldn't help thinking that I would love to read an article of similar length about someone in another profession's utter shit-headedness towards an ex. A profession like hairdressing or database management. I don't know why writers' private lives are supposed to be particularly interesting. I know the justification is that Lowell wrote a book of poems about it, and that it was supposed to be a particularly scandalous conflation of the private and the public etc but frankly the length of the article and the detail therein just felt like wallowing in exactly the worst parts of the whole affair.

Lowell is boring but toibins writing on him is appalling drivel

Haven't read the particular article you're referencing

And I don't need to bother with this preposterously long, utterly typical Colm Toibin article about letters that Robert Lowell wrote about having an affair.

lol that is a pretty fair summation

I don't know why writers' private lives are supposed to be particularly interesting.

Everyone loves gossip + parasocial relations with celebs.

I read that Tobin piece and concur, but for the bits on Hardwick, whose writing I've been getting to know more in the last year or so.

The piece by Rose on Camus is really fine and you all should read it. The way it integrates covid with a novel that has had a bizarre re-discovery.

Tracer Hand's post above is my favourite on ILX for some time.

LRB used to (might still do) advertise internships only in its own classifieds. I guess it saves money, but doesn't do much for diversity.

Thank you pinefox! :)

I don't know why writers' private lives are supposed to be particularly interesting.

They are to other writers it would appear. Especially Phil Space.

i think LRB's been quite meaty recently but but my reason for reading tends towards "odd perhaps useful fact i was till now unaware of" rather than "deeper understanding of specific topic or person close to my heart" -- and on the whole i prefer the fact to be historical rather than personal these days

i vaguely had an urge to write a letter abt runciman's whitewashy takedown of rahm emmanuel (but i was too busy writing abt adam ant) (who still doesn't feature often enough in this so-called magazine)

(i sent them an actual pitch a couple of months back but got no reply) (i am very very bad at pitches)

i like jacqueline rose but also tend to leave her big long pieces to "read later" as i assume they will be intellectually demanding -- and then entirely forget to read them

adam ant) (who still doesn't feature often enough in this so-called magazine)

Excellent!

it reads like the pitch i sent was abt adam ant but it wasn't (one of several problems with it)

"The poetry that gets printed by the lrb is generally from a very small number of poets (Anne Carson, John Ashbery (rip) August klienzahler, Rae armantrout) some I love (eg the first two) some I quite dislike (the second two)."

Btw I have noticed more people whose poetry I've heard of on twitter being published in the lrb in the last year or so.

"i will never log off"

I came across this piece from Al Alavarez's (someone I hear about now and then but never in an interesting enough way to actually read up on) ex-wife today, reviewing Al's account of their marriage:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n10/ursula-creagh/first-chapters

It has that tediousness of the literary brand of gossip, but its a one of a kind too.

enjoying the big piece on robert louis stephenson and henry james in bournemouth -- which i think does the spadework to establish how a long gaze at entwined biographies can in fact be illuminating

(if only bcz it notes -- claims? -- that henry jekyll of jekyll and hyde fame is in fact a. based on his close friend james ftb same initials and b. kind of a critique of james' attitudes to the world and to writing?)

(also bcz fucksake it's fascinating that these two writers were so close)

i thought the hardwick reaches of the lowell-affair essay were also interesting, tho very VERY buried in much too much material abt lowell, who always elicits a massive #whocare from me -- not that i give much of a fuck abt poetry at all but with him it's like "what if beat poetry but dully posh?"

Might fuck about with the Christopher Rick's archive:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/christopher-ricks

(Read the piece on Empson's Using Biography last week, which I did enjoy. I finished Gulliver's Travels recently so his piece on Swift is just in time)

A lot of swearing going on here.

I very much agree with Mark S's post except his spelling of RLS's name.

Is RLS in the TLS or the LRB?

LRB, in May.

woops

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n13/amia-srinivasan/he-she-one-they-ho-hus-hum-ita

I’ve​ had the wrong pronouns used for me – ‘he/him’ instead of ‘she/her’ – by two people, as far as I know. One of them was an editor at this paper, who I am told used to refer to me as ‘he’ when my pieces passed through the office. In his mind only men were philosophers. The other was Judith Butler. I had written a commentary on one of her books, and she wrote a reply to be published along with it. In the draft of her response, she referred to me by my surname and, once, as ‘he’. Just a few lines later she wrote: ‘It is surely important to refer to others in ways that they ask for. Learning the right pronoun ... [is] crucial as we seek to offer and gain recognition.’ I wrote her a meek email – this was, after all, Judith Butler – pointing out the error. She replied not twenty minutes later: ‘Sorry Amia! I always did have trouble with gender.’ Swoon.

Dreadful, dreadful first paragraph. The highlighted sentence is very offensive, all the more so in the context of what follows. I made it a couple more paragraphs in but I've decided not to continue.

Can you explain to me, what's wrong with the sentence, the paragraph, or the piece?

I'm a little curious as to your thinking here.

I laughed at the bit highlighted (guess the editor either moved on or took it with good grace).

That was one the best things the LRB has published this year. Great essay on language and politics and one of the few things that should be read by more people and re-published in places like The Guardian xp

The sentence attacks another, unnamed, person, without evidence.

The attack is based on hearsay - 'who I am told' - rather than any written evidence seen by the author.

The attack is false - as anyone who is an editor at the LRB will be able to name several women philosophers. Including Judith Butler, who writes for the LRB.

The basis for the attack is undermined further in the next sentence, which notes that Judith Butler made the same mistake. The author doesn't then state that in Butler's mind, only men were philosophers.

Personally, if editing the work of someone whose gender I didn't know, I would check it. I think that people should always be careful about this kind of thing. Maybe this editor wasn't caeful, and should have been (but then, the editor's behaviour is purely hearsay - most things reported third hand are unreliable).

But the primary reason that any UK editor would make this mistake, in this particular case, is simply that 'Amia' might not be such a familiar first name to them. Personally I am not sure I have encountered another person with this name, apart from this author. I would assume that a name ending in 'a' was female or feminine, as that is quite conventional - but hardly universal.

Even if you supposed, hypothetically, that the unnamed editor, unsure of gender, had defaulted to male -- something that one should not do, and could be worthy of criticism -- then this accusation should be stated as such, not confused with the hyperbolic and false allegation in the sentence. Hyperbole and falsehood tend to obscure the real issues that need addressing. For instance, the fact that more men than women get to publish in the LRB.

My comments are on this paragraph - I make no comment on the rest of the article.

Sometimes people report others behaving in ways that seem alien or wrong-headed to you, because these are not ways you could ever see yourself or imagine yourself behaving, therefore it's incomprehensible to you that others might act that way. (Such as not checking an unfamiliar name on a byline.)

In these situations, is your reaction to assume that the person describing these experiences is lying, or mistaken, or otherwise just plain wrong? Or is your reaction to think about the ways that people who aren't like you, might have access to experiences that are quite different from yours, that you have never encountered?

Because I think the latter technique is really important to understanding what pieces like this article are *about*. What if instead of that "this must be a hyperbolic lie", you thought "this person is a woman, and I am not; this person is Asian and I am not. Maybe they've had different experiences that led them to different conclusions?" and went along reading the rest of the article with that understanding in mind? They might not be wrong, they might just be different.

Because it really is a very good, very interesting article about the challenges of grammar, and about getting stuff right, and about how to behave when you accidentally get stuff wrong. When Judith Butler gets your pronoun wrong, that's *funny* - and the humbling of a person who is considered an expert on gender actually provides a lovely intro to how other people, who are less smart than Butler, can also learn to negotiate that grammar.

I really liked this piece, tbh, and wish more stuff by Srinivasan was in the LRB. Her cephalopods article was one of their best.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/andrew-o-hagan-the-great-chip-pan-fire-novelist-of-the-age-1.4338597

Speaking of social media, O’Hagan had his own experience of “cancel culture” in 2018 when he published a long essay on the fire at Grenfell Tower, London, which had killed 72 people. In it he was “disgusted that the Tory government were manipulating this fire for political purposes. I went into depth on how international companies had been able to flout British safety laws for their own profit. But those things still didn’t please my friends on the left, because I also pointed to their unfairness.” He rejected the idea that the Conservative council in whose borough the fire took place did not help the victims and their families, and he was critical of the response on the night by the London Fire Brigade and of some of the activist groups that claimed to speak for the residents of the tower block. “It was obvious,” he says of his critics, “how few of them had actually read the piece. It was 65,000 words, and within 45 minutes of it being published, thousands of people were online, quoting each other, saying I should be shot.”

What rubbish.

His granny seems sound though.

Frances Stonor Saunders seems to have published an entire (short?) book in 3 issues of the LRB.

Avoiding most of it has been a good way of catching up on LRB issues.

Jenny Turner really is the best the LRB has. This write-up of the Feminist movement is so good and comprehensive with some nice reflections as a (somewhat, sometime) participant (losing books by Feminists through so many house moves). Really necessary.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/jenny-turner/dark-emotions

jenny T and i once got chucked out of soho's the FRENCH HOUSE for running up its narrow stairs too noisily when the upstairs bit was in fact closed

when oh when will i write up my tales of the wild 80s

900-page biography of Warhol, reviewed at great length (as always) by Colm Toibin, who mainly just tells the story of AW's life, apart from a pretentiously digressive non-linear (ie: later event) opening that doesn't go anywhere or have any positive structural effect.

What is the point?

the element in that wound me up most: he's arsey abt the biographer's mundane attempts at art crit but while he quotes some much better crit (the generally good wayne kostenbaum, the reliably great gary indiana) he delivers none at all of his own, no toibinesque insight or perspective

i mean i think the precis IS the point -- you read this so you don't have to read a full 900-page warhol biog, i use LRB this way a fair amount -- but if that's all you're doing you don't really get to cast sneery shade at the person who handed you the materials you're boiling down imo

David runciman's talking politics podcast used to advertise some website that would summarise dreadful airport pop sociology books so you could get the jist in minutes. It came in handy when I had an awful boss who used to prescribe these as part of my job and actually quiz me on them.

Mark S: yes, I agree, the worst thing about the article is that it offers no insight at all of its own.

For you or me, writing for the LRB would, frankly, be a big deal. We would give it our best shot. In that perspective, to do it as lazily and badly as Toibin is insulting.

It's astounding that F. S. Saunders ended up using her three very long episodes to transcribe letters saying things like 'Oxford, 1949: Are you coming up for the summer hols?'

Toibin's recent piece on having cancer was ace. Haven't read the warhol article because it now takes even more forevers for issues to arrive in Australia. Still waiting for the last 3 to get here.

Adam Mars-Jones explains in detail why he doesn't think an acclaimed book works well.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/adam-mars-jones/cows-are-more-important

One of the finest literary reviewers of the age.

Dreadful, arrogant, entitled 'diary' on leaving an academic post:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/malcolm-gaskill/diary

One of the dumbest things about it is that it conflates changes in the academic world (which it's often reasonable to complain about) with changes introduced specifically, at short notice, to deal with the pandemic (which nobody in HE, including the best-paid managers, wanted or foresaw).

It used to be more interesting. In 1993, Keele still bore a resemblance to the world Malcolm Bradbury captured in The History Man

holy shit

Among other things:

So when my wife accepted a job in Dublin and I took a career break to look after our children, settling into non-academic life was easy. I didn’t miss it, any of it.

The facts here are basic to what he is talking about, but he passes over them.

His job was in Norwich. His wife took a job in Dublin. Did he go with her? Did he stay with the children in England? Did her job finish and she return to England? Without these basics, you can't make sense of the practicalities of his decision. On the face of it, it sounds like he has a nice new life in Dublin, supported (he does say this) by his wife.

Note that he took a 'career break' two years ago. Did that break finish? Was it still ongoing when he left his job? Was he being paid again at that time, or had he been on unpaid leave for over two years by the time he resigned? Again, any proper account of such a momentous life decision would need to explain these things.

It is worth emphasizing that most people do not feel *able* to quit their career aged 53. The fact that he can do this makes him very fortunate.

There are lots of other bad things in the article.

that history man quote needs expanding:

It used to be more interesting. In 1993, Keele still bore a resemblance to the world Malcolm Bradbury captured in The History Man (1975): lecturers taught whatever enthused them [...] and the cooler professors held parties to which students where invited

if you haven't read it, the cool professor in the novel who throws parties is a sociopath and rapist who destroys the careers of students and staff.

it might be less vapidly self-absorbed if he'd made some slight effort actually to exemplify (and better time-locate) a few of the generalisations. it's a blur of sweepingly unspecific contrasts, against a distant backdrop of imposed changes perhaps good perhaps bad. if he wants his retirement to be bracing not torpid, maybe he needs to slay a few of the very particular dragons he's so vaguely hinting at -- mabe even name some names? did he sign NDAs?

i mean it's maddening because the genuine shapes of some things bad and good are discernible somewhere under this clumsily twitched blanket --political, sociological, pedagogical, even personal -- but if he himself has any good sense of how these systems interact now and have interacted over time, he's not letting on

(my unkind guess is he doesn't really, bcz he isn't terribly interested? if he was he'd find it hard not to talk abt it, NDA or no NDA) (even more unkind: i started thinking "justified imposter syndrome strikes again")

(responding to ledge: yes i was thinking "the good old days! where we could fuck students, or else just them up")

s/b "the good old days! where we could fuck students, or else just fuck them up"

I like the wording of Mark S's post. One of his best little commentaries in a while.

It's plain that THE HISTORY MAN is a terrible precedent, and unselfconsciously saying 'I liked university when it was like THE HISTORY MAN' is dire - but, despite the author's awfulness, he seems *not* to mean things like sexual harassment. He's certainly not explicitly harking for that.

But he does say, with unpleasant casualness, "Provided he – and it was usually a he – turned up fully dressed and sober and didn’t lay hands on anyone, the crazy lecturer could be an inspiration." True. But the sentence gives too many hostages, implying that these bad things *might* easily have happened in the older world.

Actually, implying that they typically did or even that people were often 'crazy' is inaccurate and unhelpful (even to his own case against change). The truth is that if you're going to raise weighty topics, like sexual harassment at work (including education), you should take it seriously and state facts. Or don't raise it at all. Innuendo won't do.

None of which, as we've seen, even starts to cover how bad this article is.

Oh, the other thing I was going to say to Mark S was: I wish he had signed an NDA !! It's outrageous that he's quit, taken a pay-off (unlike, probably, what most people would get on leaving their jobs), and then turned round and written an article (for yet more money) criticizing his old job and citing (though not naming) former colleagues, saying that many of them also wish they could leave.

This is - I'd like to say 'unprofessional' behaviour, but the author has just blithely walked out his profession. Well, it's bad behaviour, and it might have been appropriate for his pay-off to include a contractual ban on such things.

Adam Mars-Jones explains in detail why he doesn't think an acclaimed book works well.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/adam-mars-jones/cows-are-more-important

One of the finest literary reviewers of the age.

― the pinefox, Sunday, 20 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

So the last review I read by him +of a Dag Solstad novel, a writer I like) also unfavourably compared the work it to Nabokov iirc. That aside, my problem is that it feels like I'm in a creative writing workshop, with set ways of creating tension, of making psychology work, of provoking you into a state of shock. When it doesn't meet that criteria this is marked down.

And it's incredibly boring to read.

I thought he did a good job on joy Williams where he seemed particularly charmed by her idiosyncratic approach to storytelling mechanics and upending them. Didn't feel rigidly disapproving, but I generally only read his bits when I run out of things that look more immediately interesting and I'm on holiday or something

I read his articles when I am ready for a treat.

I read many of the others as a duty.

Did anybody read the 3-part suitcase thing? I have no idea what it's about and if it's worth reading given it's ultimately the length of a short book.

Nope, no one here has. Just did a quick search on twitter and a few people have enjoyed it..

but I generally only read his bits when I run out of things that look more immediately interesting and I'm on holiday or something

― plax (ico), Wednesday, 23 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

It's terrible that he monopolises their fiction reviews (it's not exactly a Penman-esque domination but it looks like he is its main reviewer), then again I seldom go to LRB for their fiction coverage.

It's terrific that he reviews fiction for them often. He's wonderful at this particular job.

But numerous other people also review fiction for the LRB. Christopher Tayler is one of the best but seems to do less at the moment.

James M: I read lots of the Suitcase project without properly engaging with it. It looked like a massive bout of self-indulgence.

But numerous other people also review fiction for the LRB. Christopher Tayler is one of the best but seems to do less at the moment.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 23 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Yes and they are trying to give newer voices some space: Lauren Oyler, Emily Witt and Patricia Lockwood..

I rediscover this article, which I saw given as an LRB lecture:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n08/michael-wood/fritz-lang-and-the-life-of-crime

Looking forward to rereading now I know a bit more about Fritz Lang.

cheers, pinefox. Skimming it did not help me work out what it was ABOUT. A bit of context wouldn't have gone astray.

James Lasdun essay on Christian forgery - more entertaining than expected.

Tove Jansson letters - good topic.

don't read adam mars-jones very often for what is possibly a silly and even a spiteful reason: many many years ago he reviewed chris cutler's "file under popular" and dave rimmer's "like punk never happened" for the TES: the first is an interesting but quite poorly written collection of essays (on music and technology and the politics of both, among other topics), the second a superb i-was-there jab by a smash hits writer at a chronicle of the rise and fall of the new pop… amj gave the latter a poor review (he didn't really get it) and the former more of a thumbs-up than it deserved, very much as if to say "more of the latter less of the former" plz. i disliked the bumptious way he apoproached this task and strongly took against the idea of him…

… and here we are 35 years later, with me still holding those 600-odd ancient words fiercely against him! the effect is that i read his review here very much assuming he was missing the point and that everything he declared was bad must be good. i probably need a better -- much more recent and relevant -- calibration, like his review of a novel i've read, to see what he's bringing to it that i'd miss and where his tastes in fiction are located in relation to mine.

a subsequent edition of "file under popular" is rewritten and better, bcz cutler's girlfriend was to be the translator (into german iirc) and told him she refused to translate it until he made it read better 👍👍👍

she told me this at a garden party we were all at -- thrown by members of AMM lol -- which was funny bcz he was sat beside her not saying anything. i've given both editions a bit of a dusty review at different times so he probably feels abt me much the way i do abt adam mars-jones. this is the shape of the world 🌍🌏🌎

What is AMM?

A musical group

you wouldn't like them pinefox

Lol

I relate to mark's anecdote because I'm still kind boycotting Vice in the year of our lord 2020 because it seemed shit in 2004 (tbf recent threads have suggested I'm not missing much)

There is quite a lengthy digression on AMM, in the context of a mini-chapter on Cornelius Cardew, in the context of a larger chapter about Eno's Obscure Records label, in the forthcoming Paul Morley book on classical music fyi, so The Pinefox may possibly soon become more au fait.

"… and here we are 35 years later, with me still holding those 600-odd ancient words fiercely against him!"

No no this is good not bad.

Actually what am-r's method reminds me of is Nabokov's lectures, which I spent a bit of time with earlier this year. It's a page-by-page reading that merely verifies whether a novelistic technique and logic is thoroughly applied but I often feels that even if pages are often wrong the book overall can be really good. In other words, a novel is not a piece of furniture!

But I have never studied writing (or anything artistic) either in a formal setting or as a hobby so that's where the irritation comes from

xxp vice has some ok reporting but I pretty much do a pick and mix of what comes from my twitter.

Neal Ascherson on break-up of Britain stuff. I'm reluctant to criticize him as he's such an old stager, but I find him too figurative and imprecise a writer to do this well. He creates generalities (Britain and England) to make an argument when they might as well be reversed.

He's also wrong to think that no-one in England cares about the union with Scotland. On the whole he writes on this stuff from too much inside his own self-confirming bubble. And when will people, from the great Perry down, stop citing Tom Nairn's deeply uninteresting and unhelpful coinage of 'Ukania' as though it's a brilliant and witty insight? (They won't.)

Enjoyed this account of Gornick's writing, which is nice to read in parallel with Turner's piece I linked last week:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/08/vivian-gornick-desk-daring/

Bee Wilson on wheat: one of the most tedious and impenetrable LRB articles I've read.

And compounded by starting with 'During lockdown, my Cambridge neighbours have been helping each other buy flour to make their sourdough bread. Isn't it interesting how during this uncertain time, we've all returned to the joy of baking'.

I'm now in a position I can hardly remember ever being in: Have finished every backlogged LRB and passed them on and have no current LRB at all until the new one arrives.

It's a rare pleasure, bask in it.

i can send you my login if you like, so you can start again at the beginning

Nick Cohen used to write for them

I am also caught up, but only because I am now waiting for 4 issues to actually show the fuck up.

Christopher Tayler quite generous to Amis.

Clair Wills surely too generous to Ali Smith.

I was interested to learn (from the Backlisted podcast, not deep knindie knowledge) that Andrew O’Hagan was once in The Big Gun, whose single I am sure I once owned, but don’t seem to own anymore:

https://youtu.be/JuDI1X84sHU

the cohen contributions (3, all 1998-99) seem like relics from a difft order: back when he was mainly known for being a critic of blair?

i mean i could actually read them but

lol Stewart Lee sent in a letter

Avoid reading on Amis and Smith and if you are starved of literary coverage read this excellent piece on Chinese classical poetry instead.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/08/du-fu-li-bai-poems/

i am finally reading the papyrus forgery story omg 🧐🤪😳

(the story is amazing, the piece so so)

I like Tim's post though am unsure whether 'knindie' is his coinage.

(It is, I thought it looked funnier than “nindie knowledge”)

Is 'nindie' a recognised word, then?

did anyone read Andrew O'Hagan on Soho from back in the summer? Terrible nonsense of the first order, naturally I came here to post it so we can all have a good laugh https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n14/andrew-o-hagan/seventy-years-in-a-colourful-trade

The piece that unwrites itself: "When it’s over, when your youth is gone, you wonder what those times were all about, but there’s no point asking. They were about Soho and a whole lot of nonsense you’ll never hear again."

i am so old i remember when o'hagan was an interesting writer (i shd go back to those pieces and see if i was just a bad reader)

he seems to be putting together a lot of stuff on literary gossip and the scenes that engender it (as a massive gossip myself i am not immune to the pull of some of the tales tho my attitude to jeffrey barnard being unwell has always been #whocare)

there were the seeds of something interesting there- I think Julian Maclaren-Ross is a figure worthy of examination- and maybe Soho of yore deserves purple prose, but THIS purple?

His first book from the 1990s on missing people was very good, but that was long long ago.

yes it's the essay that led to that missing people book that i'm remembering i think, also -- was it the same piece? -- something on how sociopathic children can be w/o it being abnormal exactly

(also also a little booklet on farming round the time of BOVID SPONGIFORM, which i bought my mum as a present, and did start rereading more recently -- but i don't recall my recent conclusion)

Yes, I read the Soho article. I agree that it was purple, or perhaps just flamboyantly casual. I didn't really buy it.

The one thing I've liked by him was: James & Stevenson.

re gossip, he wants to stress that he is part of the group of gossips, and party to the gossip. He is very keen to emphasise how often he has met Norman Mailer and everyone else.

I didn't mind the Soho article as a piece of uncritical nostalgic fluff. I feel oddly attached to that particular version of the Soho mythos.

Made me think of bullshit like this
https://youtu.be/cjRLhkBi1gI

I read O'Hagan on New Romantics. (He uses a brief para to say the name doesn't matter and means nothing - an unhelpful attitude. He could at least have noted Duran's actual use of it in a song.)

It's mostly not *factually* wrong, as far as I can tell. But it's characteristically obnoxious. This writer almost always comes across as arrogant and as writing too fast and carelessly.

It also has the problem, first diagnosed on ILM, of A-level cliché. "If you think about it, New Romantics were braver and more outrageous than indie musicians!" would hardly have been a new thought at the start of Tom Ewing's poptimist movement 20 years ago -- it doesn't bear repeating as a new thought now.

really enjoyed emily wilson’s piece on three new translations of the oresteia. vivid descriptions of the mechanics of metaphor and politics, and in particular the role of women in the play and the translations.

i have seen the oresteia performed and i admit i struggled despite a vivid presentation. wish i’d had this to guide me at the time and it makes me want to read the trilogy, tho admittedly in greek rather than in translation.

also includes an angry attack on diversity in classics academia and the translations under review themselves.

It also has the problem, first diagnosed on ILM, of A-level cliché. "If you think about it, New Romantics were braver and more outrageous than indie musicians!" would hardly have been a new thought at the start of Tom Ewing's poptimist movement 20 years ago -- it doesn't bear repeating as a new thought now.

What struck me is that this argument, unlike something Ewing would write, didn't actually talk about the music at all - it's the subcultures he's comparing, where indie fans = political scolds and new romantics = more radical because they were messing with sexuality. This is an unconvincing binary, but also the way he sets it up is very old fashioned because today's kid subcultures are clearly a synthesis of these two - both highly politicized and interested in queerness.

Emily Wilson's piece is terrific, the discussion of the politics of translation is really striking better notes. Bet the letters in the next issue will be a laugh.

Emily Wilson: good when she analyses the texts, demonstrating her considerable expertise.

Bad when she attacks others for being 'elderly'.

Maybe one day she'll discover that getting old isn't that much fun. It probably isn't made better by people complaining at you for the sin of having managed not to die yet.

Emily Wilson (49, not old or young) was making a point about the demographics of translators of classical literature. That did not stop her from enjoying the translation by a 77 year old man the most.

Is there anything good on the politics of New Romantics? Couldn't understand it from what O'Hagan was talking about. He made this link with Brexit that seemed the laziest you could do.

I'd like to think someone like Penman would at least re-listen to the records.

simon price wd be my go-to here i think: dave rimmer's "like punk never happened" is very readable and i'm fond of dave -- i stayed in his berlin flat a couple of times in the 80s and he's chums w/biba kpof of all ppl -- but it kind of smash-hitses round the politics tbh

or my adam ant book if i ever get it together lol

xyzzz otm on Wilson, she's not attacking the translators for being elderly any more than she is attacking them for being white or men

49 is young, sorry if this offends

comments? closed!

*types in the box, pressing send to check whether I have been banned (for a week)*

Meanwhile this is what the former editor of the TLS is up to:

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/john-murray-reveals-forthcoming-books-podcast-stig-abell-1222179

Looking forward to having David Baddiel tell me about American Classics.

Excellent set of pieces on a novel that could be read alongside The Oresteia:

‘The unknown woman herself becomes the threshold between spheres and appears to initiate her own erasure.’ Matthew Turner on the architecture of fascism in Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel ‘Malina’ https://t.co/SJchAMrUTf pic.twitter.com/3arn3SmfzW

— frieze (@frieze_magazine) September 17, 2019

Merve Emre is good:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/22/ingeborg-bachmann-meticulous-one/

Timely! I literally just read that the Basque translation of Bachmann's 'Simultan' ('Three Paths to the Lake' in English) won best translation prize this year. A collection of five stories I've not read yet. Thanks for that link btw.

np. Three Paths to the Lake is not covered in Emre's piece but it's good not bad.

Vaguely related: I am reading Adam Mars-Jones's new novel(la), BOX HILL, a very funny and engaging story of a frankly monstrous relationship.

T.J. Clark on Pissarro and Cezanne: observant about what's in paintings, often good at finding words to describe them. But also full of pretentious, preening verbiage, and allowed to spin it out for a ludicrous 8 or 9 pages.

Might have been OK if they'd said: You can have one page for this, use it to say what you really want to say.

i was quite enjoying that piece, but had only got one page in before the LRB got dropped behind the bathroom radiator, and i haven't bothered to go online to finish it.

reading James Meek on conspiracy theories in the latest LRB, and it continues an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with Meek, which too a certain extent gloms onto my feelings about Lanchester's LRB writing. overall, what i was left with after reading the piece was that it was as much about Meek's engagement with it as it was the subject itself. Maybe i need to put that differently, the treatment of conspiracy theories felt summary and underdone, treating what is already well known and covered elsewhere, as a major topic of what i've got into the bad habit of calling 'the current conjuncture', and the bits that remain of the piece when you remove that are to do with Meek's struggle to understand people without doubt who believe things that are not true. I don't think that is valueless, btw, and in fact the closing paragraph about the greatest damage that epistemology – without doubt, without curiosity – does, is to the notion of learning, is important.

other things i took from it was Popper's original notion of the 'conspiracy theory,' that is the predilection to conspiracy as a mode of thinking: "Popper's notion of conspiracy theory referred to a personal predisposition that could attach itself to anything, precisely because it was nested in the holder's brain." Meek judges, I think correctly, that the development into 'conspiracy theories' as situations is beneficial to that mode of thinking.

Meek contests the assertion that QAn0n can be considered dangerous, like al-Qaeda, outside of a couple of examples, because of Q's instructions to passivity. Define 'dangerous' maybe (epistemic danger, or the danger that one nut goes and kills someone – which Meek acknowledges), but it did make me wonder what the reaction of QAn0n conspiracy theorists would be to a Trump loss. Whether it results in personally damaging destabilising disbelief, with a world coming crashing down, potentially creating a desire for violence, or, in a more benign possibility, whether Trump himself gets converted into a secular saviour, Barbarossa like, into a figure capable of making a future return, perhaps in another form.

Still, leaving those thoughts aside, the overall impression, as with Lanchester, is of a piece converting contemporary complexity, founded to a degree in frameworks like social media and the internet, paradigmatically different to previous frameworks of social communication, requiring new sets of knowledge, into a sort of LRB housestyle pabulum, easily digestible for an implied readership too superannuated to keep up with new concepts. it feels fuddy-duddy, not up to date with current thinking, old man struggling with the world, sort of writing. I'm being v unfair to meek, he's a lot better than lanchester, but i find meek in some respects to be a weak version failure of the strong lanchester version.

as i say, I may be being unfair. I'm not very knowledgeable on conspiracy theory, but i still may have a much better grounding in it, just by being on twitter, say, and that means I don't see the value of Meek's summary. Still, when I look at the set of thinking he's summarising, it seems a bit of a backdated number.

although they're only one voice, and there's often stuff to disagree with, someone like @Aelkus operates in spaces and with tools - video gaming, memes, infosec (with a military analyst background), and a good awareness of contemporary theory - which make them much more illuminating on the given subject. they feel like the right tools and frameworks with which to be analysing the object in question, in part because they comprise the platform on which the object is operating/feeding/infecting.

For example, Meek covers the problem of institutional trust, and the idea that conspiracy theories delegitimise those institutions, in what i would consider a fairly straight way - delegitimisation of institutions is bad because it reduces their effectiveness, and because, at base, they deserve legitimacy. He has a paragraph where he struggles with how to convey this message to conspiracy theorists, imaging himself pitied as 'a credulous centrist.' Well, I think for me, he may not be so far from the truth there, and not so far from the problem I find with this piece. As I say, he skates round the issue several times, almost as a matter of personal doubt: ('...which made me think: "That's exactly the way I feel about Boris Johnson right now." But my scepticism doesn't extend to complete cynicism about the institutions themselves.")

To take Adam Elkus on the same subject (get it while you can; he assiduously deletes his tweets), specifically around institutional communication about masks:

For a lot of people I follow and interact with regularly here, the mask fiasco alone burned what little trust they have in the idea of counter-disinfo https://t.co/3zRbaNRozQ

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

with the important point

What I get the picture of, increasingly, is the lack of a positive theory of legitimacy. E.g people assume that institutional trust is the default condition rather than something that is difficult to achieve (sometimes for reasons entirely beyond institutional control!)

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

with a subsequent important but perhaps seemingly paradoxical point that people can as a consequence overdetermine on the role of social media and 'technology':

There are real things that happen *offline* that might.....just might.....influence people's orientation towards mainstream institutions and sources of information!

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

this sort of thing leads to a certain age and certain type of commentator creating a 'it was the russians wot did it' explanation and putting in a bucket marked 'social media.'

of the NYT role in legitimating that 'Russian strategy' argument:

its just casually mentioned once, and then dispensed with as "imperfect system self-correction" amid paragraph after paragraph of turgid exposition about the woes of Facebook and such

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

enjoyed 'Wang Xiuying''s piece on 'China after Covid,' though it was also interesting to read a counterpoint to the view that gongye dang (the 'technocrat/technological/industrial party) view is dominating, in the thread here:

Currently just as many academics and lawyers as there are engineers at the top; dominant position is held by business management, finance, economics, and degrees in socialist theory/party management

— T. Greer (@Scholars_Stage) October 16, 2020

fwiw adam elkus has an archive of essays on his github which i think are often write-ups of his tweet-essays: https://aelkus.github.io

ffs is popper responsible for the present-day salience and flavour of the term "conspiracy theory"? it is 1000 yrs exactly since i last read the open society. there's a piece in GQ by never-say-former ilxor d0rian lynsk3y abt CTs -- i checked to see if it was behind a paywall (no) and googled to see if the names epstein and hofstadter feature in it (no and yes) so i'm guessing it's bad not good but i haven't actually read it yet

jeet heer recently wrote an excellent takedown of "the paranoid style" in the nation -- DL seems just to be treating it as "magisterial in its authority" or w/evs

yeah that github repository is rly good. still, there’s a lot of value in his feed, but it’s SO MUCH ALL THE TIME.

meek says popper is the originator but doesn’t say populariser so not sure. thx for the links - will definitely the read the jeet heer. maybe even the DL if i’m feeling like a benevolent elephant.

New LRB contains Paul Keegan on T.S. Eliot / Emily Hale correspondence. I started leafing through and it went on ... and on. 10 pages?

I happen to be one of the perhaps few actually *interested* in this - I'll read every word of this article - and even I can see that this looks excessive. The material will be covered by any specialist Eliot journal, etc - it hardly requires such massive, intense coverage in a generalist paper.

And what is the issue anyway? Private letters between two people who had a bit of an on-off relationship? It's not like 500pp of Eliot and H.D. debating poetics. Hard to justify.

Fizzles: your own thoughts about Meek and conspiracy appear to be more subtle and substantial than the tweets you then posted from somebody else.

on the eliot letters i must admit doing the same pf. i think the status of the letters are a lot to do with eliot and the eliot estate having a symbolic power in lit politics disproportionate to their actual cultural importance. basically they had to cover it and boy have they covered it.

on adam elkus - i think he’s a v good guide and illuminator of modern media and technology spaces. possibly i would suggest that individual tweets do not do justice to more sustained engagement but possibly he may not be congenial!

From your theorist: 'The mask fiasco'?

... when you go out, most people carry and / or wear masks, at least when they're in shops. (I expect this includes you, like me.)

It's presumably because they've heard this is advisable / necessary / mandatory.

Some people, regrettably, don't comply.

Not really much of a fiasco.

he’s referring to the consistent advice at the beginning of the pandemic that masks did not help prevent the spread of covid and might even do harm. this despite a number of vocal commentators (zeynep tufekci the most prominent) showing strong evidence that it was known that at worst they were a cheap risk avoidance method and at best would help spread the prevention of covid.)

advice was then switched to masks being mandatory on the basis of changing scientific evidence without much actually changing at all other than masks being more available. the UK was even further behind than the states in this respect.

that’s the fiasco to which he’s referring.

his point being is that it’s hard to convince people that institutions aren’t responsible for top down disinformation in scenarios like that.

and that such doubt contributes (in his view “wrongly but nevertheless”) to conspiracy theorising.

I think the current UK government is the most evil and mendacious in my lifetime. I hate the current UK PM more than any politician ever. But on the particular issue you cite, I think they were simply (another of their great flaws) stupid, hapless and incompetent.

That's bad, but not really conspiracy theory material.

i think elkus is discussing the situation in the US

My comments on Fizzles' thinker (whom I don't know) led away from the real topic, on which Fizzles was interesting: Is Meek's article good or bad?

I read it last thing last night and I can somewhat now see what Fizzles meant.

Reading the article I mostly felt: this is OK. No real problems with it.

But it leaves doubts. As far as I recall, Meek never defines what he means by conspiracy theory. Which means that we can never really tell whether someone has a conspiracy theory, or a bad theory, or just a theory.

Meek also implies a kind of pathology - that conspiracy theorising is a sort of condition / illness that you get into or out of - but doesn't explain the mechanism by which you get into or out of it.

A corollary of all this is: Meek doesn't really admit that there might be a continuum of thought, from 'mad conspiracy theories' to what many of us could consider 'sensible critical thinking', and a lot of contested mixture in between.

The figures in the poll he quotes at the start are worth looking into. They look very high. Is this, then, that poll that attributed 'conspiracy' thought to people holding what actually sounded sensible views? There was a lot of criticism of that at the time.

xposts and apologies for re-de-railing.

i've taken the odd step in this post of just indicating for each para what specific area that para applies to, to avoid crossing the streams here.

[abstract argument about epistemic health] yep - US. though i think the general points he's making, about epistemic health – from where do we get information and what is the quality of that information – holds more widely true. the general application here is that it's not necessarily about the masks specifically, but the fact that this sort of institutional gaslighting creates the conditions for conspiracy theorising.

[abstract argument about epistemic health] riffing beyond what he says slightly, institutional silence and institutional lying are obviously not unknown historically, perhaps what is different here is the easy shift from one message to another without evidence change and with a fair bit of institutional 'you must do this' and 'don't you see', which is why i call it gaslighting above, perhaps slightly dangerously.

[meek lrb article]the general reason to bring it up here is that Adam Elkus is like a monkey in the rigging on this sort of stuff. plenty to disagree with and chew on, yes, but meek looks like a bit of a landlubber in comparison. you might allow it if his article were full of links and further reading (again, something elkus is good at), but there's Popper and one recent book on conspiracy theory (which may be v good), and the rest is Meek in the park arguing with randos.

[specific thing about masks] just finally on masks specifically, rather than as one example of a more abstract argument, i actually find the UK example even more 'fiasco' like than the US. One thing that was notable in the US was from very early on a very noisy cohort of people writing about how we should be definitely wearing masks to help reduce the likelihood of transmission. The most obvious figures were the slightly silly but still quite powerful Nicholas Nassim Taleb (of The Black Swan), and the very good Zeynep Tufekci in The Atlantic. It produced a sizeable social media group of people actively pushing masks, and attacking the CDC and other institutions for not doing the same. Those institutions responded robustly on masks and then later equally robustly said people should be wearing them.

In the UK i didn't notice any particularly noisy pro-mask people, although the government and crucially the government medical advisor message was that there was no evidence they made any difference and may indeed do harm. so i think if there wasn't perceived to be a 'fiasco' in the UK, it's only because all media was fairly quiet on it.

i felt i noticed this in particular because i had a bit of a bee in my bonnet whenever travelling through east Asian countries about how many people were wearing masks and what i perceived to be overzealous health cordons at international borders. well, obviously it was the experience with SARS and almost immediately Covid hit the UK i was thinking why aren't they recommending wearing masks? (I did not myself wear a mask). needless to say i feel very fucking silly now.

pinefox i think the questions in your post are interesting, and - you're right - meek sort of raises but doesn't address them.

i think my general recent experience of meek is a bit cruder, which is i tend to say 'and?' or 'so?' at the end of his articles. or a feel he's described the situation, but not usefully gone into either underlying mechanics of it (insight), or what might be done.

i also thought the figures were high. I wondered if this was an approach that took many examples of conspiracy thinking and saw how many people believed in (rather like that excellent report into UK anti-semitism, which found that although the number of people who were anti-semitic was very low, the number of people who held at least one example of anti-semitic thinking was high).

just answer whether i think the piece is good or not, i think my answer would be... not really? if i were a teacher marking an a level essay i would say “C+ covers the subject well but doesn’t attempt any higher
level analysis. doing this will help you get a B, doing it well will help you get an A”

The more I think about Meek's article, the more I agree with Fizzles on it.

"this sort of institutional gaslighting creates the conditions for conspiracy theorising."

This seems accurate. But then - you and I both agree that there has been such gaslighting, and yet we don't believe we have fallen into conspiracy theorising.

Conspiracy theorising is always someone else's problem. This is one of the most obviously suspicious things about it.

"there's Popper and one recent book on conspiracy theory (which may be v good), and the rest is Meek in the park arguing with randos."

Yes, this is part of the problem here. Meek's other articles have been much longer and much fuller. He writes about farming, and talks to lots of farmers, and learns about farming. Here, he ... randomly meets someone in a park. And randomly meets someone at a demo. That's it.

re: the study I mentioned that inflated conspiracy numbers: here is a link:
https://leftfootforward.org/2018/11/guardian-and-academics-under-fire-for-indirectly-branding-entire-british-left-conspiracy-theorists/

The survey stated:
“The most widespread conspiracy belief in the UK, shared by 44% of people, was that ‘even though we live in what’s called a democracy, a few people will always run things in this country anyway'”.

Lefists, including Owen Jones as I recall, stated that this was not a conspiracy theory but a reasonable observation.

This is simply an example of the possibly fluid or contested border between 'conspiracy theory' and 'sensible critical approach to society'.

I do think that there must be a distinction between mad conspiracy theories and sensible critical views. But Meek doesn't properly theorise what it is, even though it's what his whole article relies on.

Here is another example of a problem that Meek does not even mention:

When RLB was fired this year - one of the most significant stories certainly in the UK Opposition in 2020, and one with big effect on the politics and even membership of the Labour Party - the official reason given was that she had endorsed an 'anti-semitic conspiracy theory'.

She hadn't. To say that she had was a slur - practically libellous. But this was the official reason given by LOTO, not just by a Daily Express gloss on the event. So 'conspiracy theory' is a term that can be easily used, very officially, by extremely mainstream people, to delegitimise statements that they find inconvenient. This suggests that a critical and cautious approach to the term may be appropriate.

I think ultimately what Fizzles has helped me to notice is that this was a peculiarly poor instance of Meek's work - short by his standards (which can seem a blessing), half-baked, under-researched, failing really to carry through its thought or define its terms, relying on shared starting terms of reference rather than being prepared to question them.

Andrew O'Hagan, Short Cuts on fresh air in Berlin: rambling, random, yet much more readable than usual, and less offensive.

Really unusually poor letters page in LRB 22.10.2020, including a feeble (though lengthy) defence of the judgment of R.B. Ginsburg by someone who lives in Shrewsbury.

checking the shrewsbury letter out in case it's some clown i went to school with

(no afaicr)

https://londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/collections/debut-novelists-in-conversation-with-preti-taneja

LRB-based event featuring Eley Williams who is known to Tim.

I had been thinking that maybe my previous dismissal of the ludicrously long Eliot letters article was unjust; that maybe it would be good reading.

It's quite well written (but too arch, with various references to the poetry unsignalled, perhaps unfair to those who don't know them). But it has almost no structure, is just one of those articles that, given large amounts of space, allows itself to ramble anywhere without progressing (except maybe, very gradually, in chronology).

I am still only halfway through. Perhaps it will change my mind. But so far:

My sense is that it's a lot of fuss about something rather embarrassing -- the fact that TSE was happy to have a 'relationship' of sorts as long as it was at the longest possible arm's length (ie: virtually two continents away if possible).

Larkin and Flaubert also had this kind of correspondence, but that was with women with whom they had sexual relationships -- but who were frustrated that they couldn't live with the writers. There's an unhappy situation here of needing relationship and needing to escape it. This could happen to anyone - it's not a crime - but it's not worth vast exploration either.

TSE's tale seems more pathetic than Larkin and Flaubert's as, as far as I know so far, he didn't even have a sexual relationship with this woman (maybe rest of the article will contradict this). She was just a friend, but someone he spun out in this special way for a ridiculous amount of time -- before eventually deciding this hadn't even been worth doing. And the impression is that her letters were totally unlike his, and she wasn't getting what he was getting from the correspondence.

It's a case of human fallibility. I can sympathise. We all have such failings. But it's too pathetic, I think, to bear this amount of rambling coverage. It's breaking a butterfly on a wheel.

I started Patricia Lockdown, I mean, Patricia Lockwood, on Vladimir Nabokov with quite high hopes. It started well - bold, vivid, imaginative.

As it went on, my hopes fell. Disappointing, frustrating. Even what had initially seemed such a strong gambit turned out to be oddly ill-founded. In my head I formulated a long account of specific things that were not quite right about the article, but then realized there was no point writing it out. No-one else would ever agree anyway.

I will just propose:

1: This is a talented writer who may not be currently doing full justice to her talent.

2: This writer, in what I've read, relies heavily on received ideas. That is, much of her prose seems to be about bouncing off images of, eg a writer, that the reader already has. I can see some appeal in this. And her LRB readership is typically well-read enough for it to work.

But there are limits to it also. It could be a good exercise for her to write about something in a way that doesn't presume a bank, an 'image-repertoire' as Barthes' translators put it, of pre-existing clichés about it, but has to describe and explain it to the reader from the ground up.

Sadly, despite being such an annoying disappointment, this review may well be the most interesting thing in this issue of the LRB.

Evidently I'm operating at a far lower level of sophistication but I found something to enjoy in every paragraph of this piece!

Also think that all LRB reviewers should henceforth be obliged to produce bingo cards for the authors under review like PL's of Nabokov.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ElbxFMAXgAEe904?format=jpg&name=large

This thread title is peculiarly fulfilled by an LRB article about the TLS.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n21/stefan-collini/book-reviewing

I'm currently navigating the thorny problem of intrusive thoughts developing into intrusive speech with one of my kids (and the attendant problems of shame and censure) and I idly put 'taboo' into the LRB search and came across this (mostly) great Nicholas Spice essay on psychoanalysis: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n01/nicholas-spice/i-must-be-mad

I think it'll be useful, by the by, but I was mostly glad to notice that one of the letters in response was from Mike Brearley, who I always forget is a practising psychoanalyst. That was my Sunday morning.

i enjoyed the lockwood, and actually laughed out loud at two lines in it. i would have been curious at your itemisation of things that weren't quite right pinefox, because i think that idea about using perceptions of a writer, such as nabokov, to describe her own version of nabokov, is an interesting one. i need to go back to the article again, but i thought it was a success.

Ian Pattern on Ngaio Marsh: It was never made clear why write specifically about Marsh at all. It's really more a survey of Golden Age detective fiction - and not an exceptionally inspired one. Does include a mild demurral from Lanchester, for Lanchester-controversy fans.

Thomas Meaney on US power had some insights, lost focus at the end, was at least in the same grand zone as Perry Anderson's vast NLR special on the same theme a few years ago.

Artist Rosa Bonheur was new to me. I could agree that her interest in animals was the most interesting thing about her.

The Lockhart Plot against Bolshevism was also new to this reader.

Barbara Newman on Medieval arts of dying: quite good.

I have walked past the Warburg Institute thousands of times, didn't know about Warburg's special collection of images or that people compared him to Benjamin.

None of these was more interesting than the flawed Lockwood.

I don't much relish reading Ferdinand Mount on Andrew Adonis - might as well read Michael Heseltine on Peter Mandelson - but it must be done.

ferdie on adonis on ernie bevin is a bit of a "posh boys lament the lost red wall" special tbh

the recent swerve into fannish luxuriating in the good and bad of mid-tier tecfic (presumably sparked by lanch's butterfly mind, here as you say w/a very guarded dissent) interests me bcz of this very belated rapprochement w/genre fiction of any type at all

belated editorial rapprochement i mean

Rosa Lyster on a climate fiction novel: refreshingly critical, though maybe veering into non-relevantly / unfairly critical perspectives by the end.

Mount on Adonis on Bevin: yes, better than I'd hoped. It managed not to remind me much of what a terrible person Adonis is. It makes Bevin seem excellent, but I suspect that this is quite a partisan position and, say, a TRIBUNE writer could give a different picture.

My boyfriend finds lockwood unreadable and i find her pieces very enjoyable. His main criticism, which has really tarnished her writing for me is how often at the moments she seems to be about to deliver a real insight or sharp observation it suddenly flips out into an observation about herself. Once you notice this its hard not stop noticing it. He found the piece she wrote on lucia berlin unbearable for this reason. he had just read a book by berlin and i thought he might enjoy the piece but he felt that it kept telling him more about lockwood than it did about berlin. I don't want to read a piece about patricia lockwood he said and this feels incredibly self regarding.

i think pinefox's observations on her are really sharp. i think she is very funny and has a way of pulling at her metaphors or coming at them sideways but yes they do often avoid the work of describing the thing she is talking about but instead pull at assumed shared assumptions about them. There is a line that is v memorable from the john updike piece where she says he grows up, not into an adult but into a country club member which i think is a v good example of her appeal as a writer and how she can be simultaneously both very witty and very lazy. I think this is a big part of her appeal, her writing reminds me of a friend who is very funny in a similar way, but i suspect she could be a lot better.

"His main criticism, which has really tarnished her writing for me is how often at the moments she seems to be about to deliver a real insight or sharp observation it suddenly flips out into an observation about herself."

Think this could be the function of being very online, which also merges with a current for auto-fictional narratives.

Lockwood being given the task of writing about male ++ writers is simultaneously interesting and lazy.

the updike one was very very funny but i got bored of the nabokov one quickly. the women writers series is much patchier than youremember as well

that said, if i see her name on the cover i'm pretty pleased

in general a thing i guess i find frustrating abt the lrb is the non-on-line-ness of its editors (gawkersphere-style) -- almost all of our crit in these theads is abt editing as much as writing

by contrast the lrb shop's account is twitter MVP hall-of-famelol

mary kay wilmers go on cum town is what im saying to an extent

cum town?

It's an irony (not really leftist, but has some currency on us left twitter) podcast

oh ok i was not sure what user mark s was advising famous octogenarian literary editor mary kay wilmers do but it sounded rather unwholesome

"by contrast the lrb shop's account is twitter MVP hall-of-famelol"

You'd also never expect it coming from the guy who runs it (if it is indeed him)

i've avoided the nabokov piece cuz it's precisely suited to make me both hypercritical and miserably conscious that i'm being hypercritical out of jealousy. lockwood is in this unfortunate uncanny valley for me where she's always good enough to trigger this but never good enough to shut it up.

i suspect the lrb editors love her but have no idea what to do with her

she has intimated a couple of times in articles that they're basically pitching her ideas so it sounds like everybody is p delighted with the setup

guess the cattiest thing i could say is that she's on the same page xp

having someone on hand who entirely gets the internet is good not bad

(suspect they also believe this applies to lanchester tho)

response to plax: it was indeed an unwholesome suggestion

"lockwood is in this unfortunate uncanny valley for me where she's always good enough to trigger this but never good enough to shut it up."

Yes, I find that quite a relevant description. She's almost always interesting or promising enough to want to read, but never actually insightful or eloquent enough to be satisfying.

"His main criticism, which has really tarnished her writing for me is how often at the moments she seems to be about to deliver a real insight or sharp observation it suddenly flips out into an observation about herself"

I'm sure this is true, and I agree with it as a criticism, but what I find more unusual is how often she seems ready to say something substantial and just says something random. Her lists of aspects of an object often include silly things that barely belong in the list or don't advance her case at all. One example, from memory, in the Nabokov article is when she's listing things that Nabokov hates that make him irritating and hard to get along with, and one of them is ... fascists. (Or was it 'Nazis'?) But there are others that are less perverse and more simply random and non-informative. I can slightly see how this is all some kind of deliberate estrangement effect but on the whole it diminishes her ability to make a case about anything.

"almost all of our crit in these theads is abt editing as much as writing"

Mine is mostly about the things people write, that appear in the LRB.

I don't think I want its editors to be more online. I'd like them just to publish slightly fewer bad articles by annoying people.

Current LRB: not thrilling. (Others are already reading the next one online, I realise.)

3 articles responding to US election - Shatz and Bromwich quite banal; Mike Davis better, but still not outstanding. And I don't want to be tokenistic about it, but out of 3 articles, why 3 male writers?

Frequent LRB contributor Colin Burrow gets a big and, as far as I can tell so far, admiring review. This starts to feel dubious.

Colm Toibin, of course, gets to publish his diary.

Back to Bromwich. Trump is often attacked for 'both sides' rhetoric. Here's Bromwich:

What most people actually hope for is that Biden will somehow talk down the violent extremes that seem on the verge of an open clash. Popular worries about the election led to a drastic spike in gun purchases. ‘The country,’ Biden said in a campaign speech in Gettysburg, ‘is in a dangerous place. Our trust in each other is ebbing.’ Gettysburg was an impressive choice of a venue to deliver the warning. This was in fact the tone that Abraham Lincoln adopted in his First Inaugural when secession had already been declared by every eventual Confederate state except Virginia. A rage for civil purification, a factional fury associated with the Tea Party, BLM and a host of lesser militant groups, has been spreading across America for a decade or more, but Trump sped up the action, and the distemper now afflicts opinion-makers on all sides.

It's fair to say that he equates BLM with the Tea Party, talks of 'violent extremes' (plural), and invokes distemper 'on all sides'.

Will he be attacked for this? Probably not much.

also on a pedantic note why mention the Tea Party in 2020 as opposed to any of the current far right groups actually active in the US?

Looking forward to this.

For the latest edition of the @LRB I've written about the two autopsies of Corbynism – the @Gabriel_Pogrund & @patrickkmaguire Westminster correspondent account, and @OwenJones84's political history. It is also about what it means to be a political leader: https://t.co/GKeN6bcvwk

— James B (@piercepenniless) November 25, 2020

It is indeed insightful and fair minded - and also, for those of who think he is shaping up to be the apprentice Pezza, includes the word "disanalogous" - though he seems to be getting flak already from some Canary-types for insufficient Corbz loyalty.

The Patricia Lockwood election response article is good!

Liked how James Butler never really talked about Johnson's Tory party or even mentioned him by name. Not that it was necessary.

the braided article is *just about* serviceable, though the best words in it are braudel's.
the edward the confessor article seems almost entirely pointless, but it's not a territory i know particularly well (though if i did, it seems hard to believe that i would get any value from the piece).

braudel ffs. not braided.

haven't read any of this yet except james butler but i do usually look forward to tom shippey's pieces -- i like that the foremost uk scholar of the viking age is also a tolkien nut lol

the patricia lockwood piece is also v good - bcos the sort of thing at which she’s v good. i want to go back and read her nabokov piece again in light of the pinefox’s interesting critique.

the piece on Edward Grey is v good, the piece on Kissinger is by Runciman so YMMV; you can certainly tell the difference between the former, written by a subject specialist, and the latter, who will write on any vaguely political (or indeed other) subject apparently on demand

i might hateread the runciman because he really grinds my gears these days and i want to top up the reasons why.

my syntax got a bit muddied above, apols. I can't quite put my finger on why Runciman is annoying- maybe there's a glibness or archness to his style that doesn't sit well with the weighty subjects he tries to address?

if you want to unpack why runciman is so ghastly i think his podcast is v useful but i only recommend to masochists

i think i must have been feeling grumpy towards the LRB and was harsh on the edward iii piece, which i briefly skimmed over again on mark’s shippey post. it is a good summary of a thin subject is a better way to put it.

i still think the braudel is a missed opportunity. although Maglaque identifies the critical point: long durée man grapples with an *event*, they don’t get to some of the strangeness and excitement this grappling generates. i must pick up my thread on the matter again.

in many ways this is because they want to treat the annales school as well as the book. but that school is worthy of a far far longer piece, as are braudel’s major histories generally, which are i think uniquely wonderful achievements.

xps

yes pompous style absolutely but i would say the absolute worst thing about runciman is that seems to really believe, at root, that ruling should be done by a specific *class* of people. the most egregious example is his bit corbyn during the first leadership competition that concluded: "It pains me to say it, but if ever an election needed a bit of fixing it was this one."

Within this frame he submits everything to v silly speculation about 'different players' moves on the board. its all about political calculation (shorn of any consideration of real world effects) but most egregiously he seems to constantly take at face value all kids of claims about idiots and spivs like cummings, gove and johnson, never really noticing the combination of luck, wealth, and connections that has landed them at the centre of such a drearily aristocratic elite. Instead its all about calculation, nous and a sort of bizarre credulity in these people's strategies that is not borne out by a realistic glance at the world and its objects.

he really is awful, for all the reasons plax says. it was the podcasts that put the final nail in the coffin for me. a few things really, 1 his voice, 2 incredibly self-satisfied centrism (taking the form that plax describes above) 3, he's just RONG sometimes, by which i mean not by my reckons, by which measure he's very regularly wrong, but just in terms of the actual world - i remember one interview with Adam Tooze, who I (slightly warily) like, and Runciman said something, in his self-satisfied, ah-yes-all-sensible-people-know tones, something which even Tooze, who seems to like him and is fairly affable, had to reject. also he just doesn't hold his views to *any* sort of criteria - he's intellectually incredibly lazy, so that more than once i have exclaimed 'this man *teaches* politics?'.

he's a shitshow. looking forward to reading his article.

haha yes agree, his basic certainty in himself and the sound of his own voice is especially irritating when he peppers his bits with like empirically false statements

Just started that Runciman article and it starts by explaining that these new biographies are out because, despite there already having been so much written about Kissinger, the authors find him a source of endless fascination. But why would we have to deal with their poor life choices?

runciman on kissinger (hurried thru, rather than studied with a lethally attentive pencil)

i: not too terrible at the background sketch of the type -- which is himself, viz a figure dedicated purely to political calculation, except dark side of same (bcz has power to make terrible things happen, repeatedly)
ii: for a grisly column DR gets sidetracked into the Erotic Dynamics of Tyrants and plays around with the "most unlikely sex symbol" trope before belatedly tossing it (lol the very word) as manifest garbage: henry can get papped bcz the press are bored and perverse -- henry doesn't fuck bcz the pretty women aren't near him for longer than it takes to snap the tableaux (as everyone always knew)
iii: he evidently from the outset has the fierce warning ghost of christopher hitchens at his shoulder so all cooing at the macchiavellian geopolitical cleverness ofdiplomatic technique doesn't entirely obscure its hideous war-crime consequences, in vietnam especially (he briefly fingerwags the pinochet stuff, doesn't even mention eg bangladesh)
iv: on the final page, in a flourish at once elegant spiteful and pleasing lol, he makes his reckoning wth hitch. i'm not saying it's worth reading the whole (overlong) piece for but it wasn't the worst way to end

along the way he slots HK into the precession of and would-be presidents he served or sucked up to, which is a lightning sketch of a half century of top-level politics. i don't think DR brings anything new to this in global terms, or even to anyone's off-the-peg understanding of any of these figures but it's a tidy teacherly summary i suppose, yes too pleased with itself but in the dim distance a smart pupil can descry changing fashions in american high diplomacy (he skips over the reagan years entirely and obama is only tackled as an epiphenomenon of the clintons). it's midly amusing to note that HK briefly declared that dan quayle was the coming god -- bcz (says a sour arthur schlesinger) "quayle listens revently to henry and henry thinks quayle may be president some day".

which leaves schlesinger as the astutely pithy voice in the entire piece, nuff said nuff said

shippey now read, and it's exactly what i go to shippey for: quirky facts

viz during the relentless half-brother succession wars that are the backdrop to edward the confessor's reign (and its norman-conquest aftermath), two of the anglo-saxon cousins had fled so far to seek safety that they turned up in kiev, plus nearly all the women under discussion are called ælfgifu (TS is funny abt how uninventive the anglo-danish were with names)

also making unexpected appearances: jerome k. jerome and macbeth (yes that one, or his actual-real historical analogue)
less unexpected: tolkien obviously (apparently traumatised by the norman conquest, "bag end" is a secret angry joke) and kipling

he doesn't make a case for EtC's importance in an LRB reader's deeper knowledge-base: even if you think history shd just be abt kings this is a highly transitional figure at a highly confusing moment (he criticises the book for not including family trees) (lol tolkien stan), but he is -- which is where kipling comes in -- interested in the myth-making, especially 19th century political mythmaking, surrounding the conquest and what came before it. interested and useful, i think, even if he miscues the dreampolitical intent in puck of pook's hill and rewards and fairies. tho this piece is at most prefaratory to a strong discussion of such material.

1. Shippey used to teach in Tolkein's old office in the Dept of English at Leeds University, had a great big fuckoff portrait of JRRT in there IIRC, sadly not of the Jimmy Cauty elves on mushrooms variety.
2. Ted the Grass, call him by his name.

Shippey's Oxford Book of Science Fiction is one of the v best SF anthologies.

Do you know his SF-writing pseudonym, Ward? It wasn't a secret that he wrote (writes?) SF but I don't think I ever found out the nom-de-electric-plume he used.

I had to check the SFE, which tells us:

He has also written short sf under the pseudonym Tom Allen, and the Hammer and Cross sequence, beginning with The Hammer and the Cross (1993), all as by John Holm, with Harry Harrison.

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/shippey_tom

since the author of the GOR novels is an academic using the pen name john norman i am going to start telling people tom shippey wrote them bcz by logic if not facts he did

"norman" do you see

Why do they email me from a different fucking person every time! Especially when I unsubscribed and have asked to be removed from the mailing list!

tbf all magazines email ppl who unsubscribe, it's a basic tenet of subscription theory

Do we not live in the era of gdpr mark!!!

lol @ subscription theory

I've had 3 different emails today. It turns out screaming 'shit off, Emma!' at my phone doesn't unsubscribe me.

I just get constant emails asking me to subscribe and offering excellent subscription rates, all of which are completely pointless as I am already a subscriber who is not allowed to make use of them.

I am an issue behind most of this discussion.

It was good to see attacks on Runciman. I dislike him because of his hostility to socialists and his indulgence towards other people that I find appalling.

I agree about his insider-club mentality, but unmentioned was his interest in democracy. He is genuinely quite interested the difficulties of modern democracy, eg: how democracy can make things (eg climate adaptation) difficult to achieve, by tending towards short-termism. I think some of his thinking here is worthwhile.

i need to go back to his book on that, or rather i don't need to because i really disliked it*, but now can't remember why.

* moderately disliked it, felt it invited and couldn't withstand pickiness, but irritation with DR made me dislike it more

To get back to the original question, I do like that the LRB is aware of and writes about other countries, whereas the NYRB is principally concerned with the Supreme Court.

nyrb has definitely been driven insane by trump

James M is correct: the NYRB is massively obsessed with the USA and especially the politics of Washington DC.

The LRB runs many articles on Africa, India, Pakistan, sometimes China, Japan, as well as its favourite terrain of the Middle East which is in practically every issue.

As a long-time NYRB subscriber I must sadly concur, though I would maintain they have been less damaged by Trump derangement than the NY Times and the New Yorker, to name 2 other well-known publications named for La Grosse Pomme - though perhaps for structural reasons, since the strictures of their format keeps them from becoming too single-minded in their obsession. I thought the essays they commissioned about the election from various writers and commentators were a waste of time, smart people trying to outdo each other to come up with suitably apocalyptic comparisons for the importance of the most important election of our lifetimes, stretched across 2 issues even. So that's another reason to look forward to the Narcissistic Cheetoh being out of office I guess.

Excellent, nuanced and accurate post from o.nate!

tbf nyrb has always gone into hunker-down mode come election time, getting as many contributors as possible to write mini-essays abt WHERE WE ARE NOW -- in tims gone by (the late 80s) i learnt quite a lot from them, but the very-online world has stripped out their usefulness i think. as a journal nyrb was badly hit first by gaining ian buruma as editor and then losing him in a debacle of his own choosing -- its response to the online world pushed it in exactly the wrong direction at the wrong time. i hear rumours they're working quite hard behind scenes to repair the damage and tackle this issue but this is certainly not yet achieved (i don't actually know who replaced buruma but this is me not using google mainly i guess)

NYker is a vast ancient rabling edifice of many mansions, which pootles on its own way less ruthlessly guidedly i feel, and able to give space to culturally interesting things: it has been a little better finding new young writers (tho lol i think last time i said this my examples were osita nwanevu, who was poached by the new republic, and jia tolentino, who was already controversial on here and subsequently became cancelled for having terrible parents iirc) but its overall editor david remnick is has always been a total clown politically and THIS DOES NOT HELP

i visited the new(-ish) new yorker offices at 1 world trade center last year and it was disorienting trying to reconcile my image of the magazine as a labyrinth of erudite algonquin roundtable vets with its physical manifestation as sleek, glass-walled workstation container. i guess in most of the ways that matter its reality as a publication doesn’t correspond with its physical premises though but with the contact books of its editors and the various interwebbings thereof

bring back the tiny mummies!

lol i dropped off a (very bad) sort story at 25 West 45th Street in 1988 -- mainly to have a reason to visit at all

i didn't get past reception of course but even that one room was somewhat labyrinthine and vmic

I have reached the LRB that this thread was talking about - the one with Tom Shippey on Edward the Confessor.

I read that and thought that Shippey was good at amiably, sometimes drolly, bringing a non-specialist into this now quite arcane world.

the edward the confessor article seems almost entirely pointless, but it's not a territory i know particularly well (though if i did, it seems hard to believe that i would get any value from the piece).

I don't understand Fizzles' original response to the article, though I believe he later adapted it.

i did adapt it. it was said in grumpiness, out of a feeling that it was lenten gruel. this wasn't correct.

LRB 3.12.2020 continued. It looks a good, inviting issue but hasn't been very enjoyable so far. Including:

James Butler: I found this much-admired article vile, one of the most arrogantly spiteful and unpleasant things I have read in a while.

O'Hagan on DeLillo: brief, sense of evasiveness / apology for not wanting to say that DD isn't very good at this point.

Runciman on Kissinger, much discussed upthread: quite unpleasant, and indeed, as I think was implied, a good example of Runciman's character. It has almost nothing to say about the morality of HK's decisions and politics - the thing that has actually kept people debating him. It views him just as a player of games. This amorality strikes me as basic to what is wrong with Runciman. DR's contempt for Jeremy Corbyn MP is consistent with this disdain for morality. And the last line is pathetic and even contradicts DR's own premises.

Edward Grey: I didn't previously know anything about him. If anything I'd say this article, too, could have been more morally serious; its view of politics is quite Runcimanesque.

Tom Shippey: highlight so far.

Cockburn on drone wars: familiar material from earlier LRBs, with the angle that tech advances are overstated. But surely at a given point, a given tech advance may finally *not* be overstated?

Lockwood's Diary in this issue, at which I've only glanced, I suspect may prove to be Lockwood at her best - with a licence to talk in neo-gonzo style about herself and her feelings. I believe that she is talented and maybe this will be a good outlet for it.

Still to come: 9 other articles, including the one on Braudel disliked by Fizzles the former chimp.

i didn't think the kissinger piece was so bad, tho not revelatory or anything. (well dan quayle as prospective medici was revelatory to me lol.) it's true that its terrain isn't moral but that's because it's a narrow but to my mind pretty destructive assault on what kissinger defenders would presumably consider his redoubt: his reputation as a great and insightful player of the amoral game of realpolitik. instead the kissinger it describes is good at social climbing and ass-kissing and little else. (it also nails w clarity imo the nature of the post-65 "decent interval" policy in vietnam, which i always appreciate, tho which is perhaps less of a refreshment in non-us media.) i enjoyed its picture of illustrious imperial malevolence as mediocrity who plays machiavelli (or lincoln) on tv but it's possible that because i don't know who runciman is i read+distorted the piece entirely thru the lens of my preexisting feelings about henry kissinger.

Difficult Listening Hour: fair play to you, you know far more about HK than I do. The 'decent interval' idea is not well-known to me and I think I see what you mean that this was an interesting motif, ie: something like how to withdraw from a war most effectively?

I see your point that the article, perhaps, punctures HK where he is seen as strongest, ie: as a canny realist, rather than a Barnum kind of fraud.

D.A. Bell on the global Napoleonic Wars: a classic LRB history review - taking on a massive book of nearly 1000 pages, disagreeing with it via casual asides showing deep knowledge of the Battle of Trafalgar. Basically good because so expert.

I have started the Braudel article - so far I find it OK! - I suspect that Fizzles, the one-time chimp, was judging it from a position of much greater expertise, which left him frustrated.

i did find it frustrating. i don’t think it’s RONG exactly. just superficial. and as i said upthread there’s a long and worthwhile piece to be done on the annales school and braudel, and the creation of what i think was a remarkable and welcome turn in history. but in such a short piece it would have been far better to focus on the really quite interesting way braudel, with his prior approaches, tackles what the writer correctly calls “the event” of the renaissance. it results in strange tensions and an almost mystical approach.

instead we get quite a lot of treatment of the early parts of the book and a general “probably not as good as burckhardt for its purpose but bully for braudel” conclusion. (disclaimer, i haven’t read burckhardt and this article reminded me to do so).

not much looking forward to: upcoming james wood on beethoven 🙄🙄🙄🙄

The 'decent interval' idea is not well-known to me and I think I see what you mean that this was an interesting motif, ie: something like how to withdraw from a war most effectively?

specifically from this war: around 65/66 the pentagon accepts that control of vietnam is no longer achievable and from there the war goal is to "preserve credibility", meaning withdraw as slowly as possible so as to minimally tarnish the image of implacable national power+will that is supposed to underpin security in the mutual-assured-destruction era. but it's during the prolongation of this "interval" that domestic opposition to the war explodes, threatening to destroy that very image from within. this conflict is how you get the nixon administration, and constructions like this:

The bombing of Cambodia in 1969... was ‘undertaken in secret from the American people’, Schwartz says, ‘in order to preserve their honour’.

in the u.s. this shift from material goals (we are here to capture territory) to abstract ones (we are here to look strong) was never exactly secret but it was-and-is occluded, whether by blaming the vietnamese for their failure to "vietnamize" the war; or by blaming protestors for objecting to it; or, later, by stuff like "they wouldn't let us win"-- "they" here vaguely meaning "politicians" but also (it is hard not to think) "democracy", since this is a kind of flattened populist version of the same distress experienced by elite policy architects discovering that the more lives they spend for credibility in vietnam, the more it's endangered at home. to me the piece suggested that the authoritarian's guiltless petulance at being caught in this strange trap is something for which kissinger (like, more famously, nixon) was personally suited:

Kissinger’s disdain for democracy in practice, while he paid lip-service to its values in principle, also gave him an easy get-out when things went wrong. Appearing before a Senate Committee in 1975 to explain why the US had been driven out of Saigon so ignominiously, he knew exactly where to lay the blame. As he told his aides afterwards, ‘I said 25 times it was Congress’s fault!’ The elected politicians had denied him the money he needed to get the job done, which in this case had meant propping up the deeply corrupt South Vietnamese regime long enough to allow the US to get out with its dignity intact. Apparently only Kissinger understood how important America’s dignity was.... Morgenthau said of Kissinger’s approach that any loss of prestige from a withdrawal was a ‘matter for speculation’, whereas the loss of prestige from pursuing the war was a ‘matter of fact’. In truth, all talk of national honour was speculative. The realists were making it up as they went along.

--but again, i could be over-impressed by this as criticism, as center-left u.s. media i think still tends to be vague about it.

continuing in my “being grumpy about things in the LRB” vein: the piece on Arsenal in the most recent edition is just dire. written by a fan who still has their season ticket even tho they run a bookshop in NYC and who has never read anything other football biogs other than Arsenal ones. the whole piece is a bad one about being a fan. isn’t lanchester an arsenal fan? maybe that’s what happened here.

otoh the perry anderson piece in the issue before the most recent one is excellent i think (see PA thread) and i’m looking forward to reading the next essay in this.

Perry

excellent if you are up for reading a detailed review of the history of ideas affecting the finer points of the EU covering thinkers you’ve (i’ve) never heard of i mean. it won’t be everyone’s baked bananas.

not mine I'm afraid - leafing through the latest issue that came today i see it continues, but I'm more interested in the review of wenger's autobiography, and I loathe football!

Surely AFC get an excess of coverage in such outlets. Sounds dire, Fizzles.

It's funny how PA has written a vast article, that most people say is too long to read, and then you see that it's 'the first of three'.

I'm still stuck two or even three issues behind.

"written by a fan who still has their season ticket even tho they run a bookshop in NYC and who has never read anything other football biogs other than Arsenal ones."

Isn't it the case that if you give up your season ticket you go to the back of the queue? #justsaying

that fan is will frears, who is may kay-wilmers' son by (did we already know this was in the mix, i certainly didn't) film director stephen frears

mary k-w ffs

I seemed to stop reading the LRB as soon as the pandemic started. Now I just read the Fortean Times.

vast three-part essay by himself on the amphibologies of the catoblepas

fortean times surely a better guide to The Conjuncture than David Runciman

broke: finding copies of INSPIRE in police searches

woke: finding copies of the FORTEAN TIMES in police searches https://t.co/obbJStwJri

— Keyboard failure error - press F1 to continue (@Aelkus) December 30, 2020

"unfounded"

Aaron Bastani has just called the LRB 'the London Review of each other's books'.

Clever wording, cheers.

Though he does have a bit of a point.

Which is why enlarging the list of contributors has been mainly to the good.

one of the newer contributors whose stuff i'v enjoyed is pankaj mishra who is married to one of the editors, herself ferdinand mount's ex wife

they must have the most dreary christmas drinks get togethers

this small-social-bubble is literally all magazines ever

(they also all have a cloud of truculent malcontents who are convinced they are more outside the blessed circle than they actually are)

as a writer and commentator mount makes me grind me teeth (lol he dissed m.r.james so fvck him) but someone totally unexpected recently told me a story abt good behaviour on his part as an editor (possibly at the TLS in the 80s or 90s

it was abt getting this person paid quickly and slapping down stupid bureaucracy but FM absolutely behaved properly and like an old-school gentleman --which the person in question was amused at and appreciative of

"convinced they are more outside the blessed circle than they actually are"

This is curiously true of Stefan Collini. I once had a long conversation with him about the LRB in which he said "I only appear in it once a year" and made himself sound very distant from it, and as though the paper's machinations were very mysterious to him.

Yet to us, Collini probably seems like an ultimate LRB insider.

Surely Mary Mount, b.1972, is F. Mount's daughter, not ex-wife?

https://www.penguin.co.uk/company/publishers/penguin-general/editors/mary-mount.html

oh you're right! i'm not sure why i thought that?

I finish at last with LRB 3.12.2020.

Reflecting on Patricia Lockwood's latest disappointing piece, I had the strange thought that to her constituency she is what Marina Hyde is to hers.

Did Michael Wood, tasked with reviewing a biography of Kristeva, actually read it? He seems to have preferred to take the excuse to go back to Dostoevsky.

I don't have LRB 17.12.2020 to hand so I move on to the following issue. James Wood eloquent on Beethoven but a sense of arbitrariness; as though you could make these fine phrases about any music.

Seamus Perry on John Carey very bad indeed, indulging his self-aggrandising anti-intellectualism at unbelievable length and scale of banality.

Perry Anderson on Europe Part II.

wood on beethoven isn't as awful as i imagined it was going to be but i think the contentful elements are thin

tho not non-existent! the claim that one of the variations in op.111 is proto-ragtime -- which obvously sounds like total bullshit -- is kinda correct (it flirts in several places with a syncopation which if played in strict enough time does resemble ragtime avant le lettre

(the obvious move here we be to explain this by taking a position on the legend/fact that beethoven was black and that his work is full of rhythmic devices redolent of african polyrythm, which non-arican players don't have much feel for and tend to elide without even noticing they're doing this) (tbc i am agnostic abt this claim and mainly adhere to it when taunting the hongro-esque)

but if i want to read "as a one-time rockfan i find in the autumn of my senescence that beethoven is good not bad" i will reach for paul morley)

But JW is more a lifelong classical adept, with a sideline in rock that he sees as rebellious - he's almost the reverse of Morley in that way.

I finish LRB 7.1.2021.

Runciman on Obama: I must admit, better than this thread's recent discussions of Runciman would indicate. Readable, fluent, but also good at pointing to Obama's seeming failure to think in terms of institutions and lasting structures.

Meehan Crist on Gaia: I didn't know she was a scientifically informed writer. Actually quite informative. Lovelock's idea of AIs saving the planet does sound far-fetched.

Fitzpatrick on Lenin: quite well done, with fresh focus on the women especially Lenin's wife.

Ian Jack on model railways: a touching subject.

Naoise Dolan on Elaine Feeney: the book sounds like it has some interest, but the author gives the impression of being yet another of the LRB's new younger writers who writes with too much display of her millennial status. The generation gap, or performance of generations, in the paper is getting pronounced.

Will Frears on AFC: dire.

Ian Jack on model railways: a touching subject.

I used to live a short distance from the shop mentioned at the beginning, never went in but was very interested to read it was much more than just a lone hobbyist's outlet.

Alan Bennet's diary the highlight of the issue obv.

i know nothing whatever abt foopball and fully intend never so to change this yet even i was cursing at points in the frears piece

example: is the "no one likes us/we don't care" millwall chant actually in fact apocryphal? were i a sub at the LRB i wd have queried this and suggested either a word change (to what the writer actually means) or (if this *is* what he means) a brief expansion (eg how did this "apocryphal" chant manifest in the world if NOT on the terraces) (i mean it's a digression and it's a hornby-driven digression at that but it's still more interesting than some of his other entire paragraphs lol)

"Fitzpatrick on Lenin: quite well done, with fresh focus on the women especially Lenin's wife."

Hard agree with user Pinefox!

It is in no way apocryphal. That article was trash.

longing for the days when their foopball correspondents were hans keller *and* a.j.ayer tbrr

It's good that everyone who has read that review, on or off this board, can see that it is, as Tim justly says, trash.

I don't rate Bennett's diary and have said so previously at length - possibly on ILB.

Much of this latest entry is as poor as ever, but relative highlights: his praise for Victoria Wood (talk about a meeting of minds - has he never done this before?); his note that he doesn't understand the poems in the LRB (me neither) but that he was interested in the footnote about Tadcaster (me too); and the last line.

Quite characteristically poor: his entry on Graham Greene, whose occasion is that he has NOT read a new biography, NOR read most of the work. So what of substance does he have to say about GG? Mainly that he once met GG who didn't comment on AB's play and had a limp handshake - and is now slighted in print for this, 43 years on. Not appropriate, and reminiscent of AB's dreadful dismissal of David Bowie c. 4 years ago.

you have indeed said so, on the occasion of AB's bowie entry --- and stevieT also then took this position

in mild-mannered defence of these entries: the idea was conceived (i think in a happier time for all concerned) as a fun once-a-year xmas entry at an angle to the rest of the issues of the magazne, when AB wd deliver a year's helping of his (acutal real literal unedited*) diary entries, and these wd be somewhat frivolous and somewhat catty (the "theatre memoir") as commenting in passing on political events and places he'd visited during the year, and plus anecdotes recounted abt his family and his own domestic ephemera, plus passing on his impressions (as arbitrarily sparked by whatever) less of the work of the ppl he'd encounted than of their affect when he met them. this very much feeds into his aesthetic and indeed his critical intellect: in his day he had a ferociously good ear for the half-baked layers of not-quite-cultured assessment (it's the core of forty years on for example and also often features in talking heads); in addition he uses a kind of perverse unassuming gossip to deconstruct the literary figures he engages with, i guess i'm thinking of kafka's dick in his drama, but yes, also the basic nature of the green room exchange, the handshake, the stultified chat of figures when they're not quite fully in public character, but also not quite not. what does this reveal about them? sometimes much and sometimes nothing at all! it's a diary not a critical essay! he doesn't do "deep" bcz he doesn't entirely trust it (also key to his aesthetic and his critical intellect)

my (equally mild-mannered ) critique is that the concept has probably long passed its best as shtick, with part of this shtick his own (somewhat passive-aggressive) self-presentation as a slight and small and easily overlooked person, very much the mole of the beyond the fringe crew, very much the wary and shy representative of his family as opposed to say his professiona role -- who by virtue of the latter neverthless gets glimpses of great personages when they are not carefully fluffed for important public consumption and a critical eye, as perhaps they wd have been with say jonathan miller or peter cook, the acknowledged big beasts of his mileu. worth noting that he is the last of this crew, the last surviving active voice of a stance that has -- by virtue of time passing as it normally does -- vanished from this world. who of his early 60s contemparies is even left? and the world he now passes through is very much colder and crueller -- the ideals and potential of that long ago time is entirely crushed, and argtuably simply looks absurd to us whose youth came later. his saving wit has curdled, he is angry and embittered and despairing and above all OLD and FRAIL now, in a time he greatly dislikes. his vanished time no longer has any collective purchase over it: the collective is forever dispersed.

i don't even slightly object to his dismissiveness towards bowie or greene of course -- in both cases they are very much still surrounded by the seamless glow of uncritical reverence, and one small angry discontented mole isn't going to bring that down, even if his discontent seems poorly fashioned. this was the probem with the bowie entry. its opacity rather than its irritability -- what took place between them in no way sparked AB's insight. in a more genial moment he might have made something of this? i don't know -- post-beatles pop culture doesn't feel like territory he any purchase except when it drifts towards more obviously camp territory (also bowie was famously a mix in semi-public -- in interviews -- of mask and of insecurity, and of an inability or even an unwillingness to deliver new dimension to his work in that context). so the device is ill-set up to work. plus that year's entry reeked of depression (it was brexit year and trump year, two events perfectly constructed to shunt AB back inside his shell to be honest). what does he have left to pass on to us: a lesser and darker thing -- the observations of the last ambassador of a moment we only have very poor purchase on now, on our times as they grate past him. the last new elizabethan lol (i mean except for herself). it's not data we'll come by any other way.

*are they unedited? i have no idea. they may well be selected, for whatever virtues the selecter sees in them in respect of a larger unit of writing

Surprisingly I omitted to say the most obvious thing about the bad entry on Greene:

I’ve been put off by the Catholicism showing through and his frequent ‘rare’ interviews. A darling of the Sunday papers in the 1960s, he was always said to be retiring while in fact being avid for publicity.

I'm amused by the reminder of Bastani's jokes about 'Tony Blair's fortnightly "rare interventions"', but more pertinent, I can't believe I didn't observe the irony of Alan Bennett, of all people, disliking someone because 'he was always said to be retiring while in fact being avid for publicity'. Because apart from the increasingly poor content of his diary, this has always been my most obvious complaint about it: that 'shy, retiring Alan Bennett, the reluctant national treasure' publishes his personal diary for thousands to read, and then makes sure to publish it again in book form. I've said this in writing at least once or twice, but I didn't expect to find AB himself complaining about the trait in someone else.

lol fvck i wrote a long and superbly devastating response to this and ilx totally ate it

i will come back to it on a day when i'm not meant to be doing something extremely different and look it's noon already ffs

as a writer and commentator mount makes me grind me teeth (lol he dissed m.r.james so fvck him) but someone totally unexpected recently told me a story abt good behaviour on his part as an editor (possibly at the TLS in the 80s or 90s

When I worked in the Asian & African Studies Reading Room in the British Library, he was a regular and was liked by the staff, and by no means every reader is!

tom: when you retire you must publish the full list of the liked and the disliked!

Lenny Henry very much in the latter camp, so I've been told.

Heh, LH was possibly the most unpleasant celebrity customer I encountered when I worked in a comic shop in Covent Garden.

I wonder if Graham Greene is still 'surrounded by the seamless glow of uncritical reverence' - he seems to me to be an author whose reputation is already fading, as the political/social context of many of his books similarly becomes more distant and obscure. Even while he was alive, both Anthony Burgess and Anthony Powell were arch Greene sceptics, perhaps for political as well as literary reasons, perhaps out of pure professional jealously.

As an arch Bowie sceptic, I wish DB's reputation would go into similar eclipse, but if anything his death has sentimentally erased criticism and caveats. Tin Machine rehabilitation well under way...

Feel like John le Carre has replaced GG wrt uncitical reverence, the serious but popular novelist who 20 yrs ago was still largely considered a thriller writer.

haha I enjoy the Le Carre I've read but even at his best he always read so desperate to be Graham Greene

Eric Ambler is the OG genre GG imo

^

greene just feels in full eclipse these days -- last person i read gushing abt him was probably lol julie burchill c.1982

im sure most of you did but i did not know that diana wynne jones was colin burrows’ mother.

i like the idea of niela orr's short piece on MF Doom -- disquisition on masks and death, personal as well as cultural -- but i don't feel it quite work weaving these topics and modes together, likely bcz the editing isn't especially confident abt the topic. of course they're outsourcing the expertise (which is fine) and yes they want to make more space this for material (and for younger writers outside the usual bastani-mocked tight white london circle), but they needed to push harder on what will need translation to their current readers and what might bring in new ones?

case in point (i already moaned abt this on twitter): set down in print, rap verses often don't do the required work to convince a reader (doesn't have to be a hiphop-sceptical sceptic) that they have of course done for a fan when heard on record, and this disparity needs addressed bcz it's locked into the justification for the discussion being in the magazine at all. (by which i mean: a reader unfamiliar with the source will sometimes read a line being described as "great" and think "but as i read this line isn't that great? quite the opposite!" -- meaning that the reasons for the stated judgment need also to be placed on the page (which precision is maybe 3/5s of good criticism anyway). of course when she's writing in the baffler orr can assume a familiarity and an alignment on the reader's part, and needn't spend time on this over there. but if this is about opening the LRB up to new -- presumably an editorial line more than it's orr's own crusade -- rather briefly opening a door in order to shut it again, then the editing needs to be more clear-headed abt who's being taught to appreciate what. the allure of cool -- or just the desire just to be a more youthful cultural loop -- are both engines that will s[putterc quite quickly in this context

adding that LRB's writing abt poetry -- where the "right to be there" isn't even contested, even if half of us just skip the actual poems -- generally does put a fair amount of the required work in? poetry's slant affect w.r.t. prose being a long-known issue.

peace out

(hiphop-sceptical sceptic = hiphop-sceptical reader)

also ignore the open brackets before "by which i mean"

"s[putterc" is what i meant to write tho

Mark S is right. I'm sure if I get round to reading this piece I'll conclude that what it's talking about is repulsive garbage.

Maybe not great to talk of a recently deceased musical artist that tons of ppl on here have a deep love of as "repulsive garbage".

Eric Ambler is the OG genre GG imo

Is Ambler despondent about the state of the British empire and the moral vacuum at the centre of it? I've never read him.

yeah pinefox I know you have "previous" with hip hop, but... I find it difficult to understand how you could be sure about your feelings about something you've not read yet, about an artist you're not familiar with

Daniel_Rf he was more overtly political than that but kinda. Less despondency and more action imo. Amateur protagonists always being underestimated by cruel and amoral professionals

ambler more disgusted than despondent i think: everything is rotten

Len Deighton a big Ambler disciple irrc - and Kingsley Amis a big fan - both of them post-war rottenists in their way

Adam Shatz on the end of the Trump era: solid maybe, but so standard, so much bien-pensant box-ticking. It's more like an Observer op-ed than the LRB. The one useful argument he makes here, which the Observer might not like, is that violence and domestic terrorism are American not unAmerican, and that African Americans might see the issues differently from whites.

Randall Kennedy on the Supreme Court: now this is much better, the real deal. Factual, clear, unflinching, with no faff about figures of speech or personal anecdotes. Just straight ahead through the salient realities and the arguments, with a cold-eyed conclusion from a progressive standpoint. More political analysis should be like this.

I'm sure that Mark S and I had a period of online admiring Len Deighton's COOKSTRIPS.

Yeah in a way a book like Ambler's Cause For Alarm is akin to one of those early modern Everyman books - a simple dude just trying to get along gets ensnared in rottenness and has to hack his way out of it

COOKSTRIPS is grebt, as is the scene in THE IPCRESS FILE where harry palmer has an unexpected meet-cute with his posh old-school boss in a modish supermarket -- which may or may not be a very early UK safeway -- and then baffles said boss by openly buying TINNED CHAMPIGNONS, bcz the best non-posh spies only use the very fanciest ingredients

I had mentally dismissed Ambler as a John Buchan type so very excited to hear he's more interesting than that!

Also need to read Deighton - really enjoyed the adaptations to cinema I've seen. Mind you a friend of mine was reading a Deighton where the German villain "perfectly emulates the Portuguese accent, as the Germans are so adept at" and as a child of German parents growing up in Portugal I'ma have to call bullshit on that.

Deighton a handy midcentury artist/illustrator also: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UyG48ICMzHA/To1XXWbzrCI/AAAAAAAAB80/pNDlaA4xD_U/s320/Penguin+no.+1442.jpg

I have owned that edition for decades. Amazed to learn that Deighton drew the picture!

via digression into the entire cockburn family and even orwell lol this is my ilx commentary on or around ambler

also you can find user aimless serially missing all the points abt him if you use the search function precisely enough

"Randall Kennedy on the Supreme Court: now this is much better, the real deal. Factual, clear, unflinching, with no faff about figures of speech or personal anecdotes. Just straight ahead through the salient realities and the arguments, with a cold-eyed conclusion from a progressive standpoint."

Sounds like Perry Anderson on the EU.

never ever listen to any lrb podcasts ever. it’s like pinefox’s observer editorial comment enacted x1000.

lol

Randall Kennedy on the Supreme Court

Aw, fuck, now the LRB is turning into the NYRB.

this piece on Mary Kay-Wilmers retiring contains two interesting quotes:

“Newspapers say the same thing over and over again and we’re all horrified and collectively up in arms and there’s normally more than one side to something,” she told the Observer in 2014. “So if you hear somebody saying something coherent and intelligent that’s not totally out of order, it’s interesting to read it.”

what happens if it's coherent and intelligent and out of order? I would think that is more interesting to read.

Last year, she explained that the LRB had endured “because we have a sense of humour that you can see without it necessarily being declared. We’re not po-faced, as it were.”

lol rite.

also, consulting editor, who was the editor, senior editor and deputy editor taking over - someone who knows about editor roles tell me whether this is a recipe for disaster? My only analogy is management where having someone who used to be in charge still with an ability to make their opinion felt, and two people in authority feels very very bad.

Those quotations from her seem broadly accurate. You don't agree?

'out of order' seems a floating phrase here - if something is coherent and intelligent, then it is already in order? Maybe what she meant by 'out of order' was contrarian / offensive, in a way that maybe the SPECTATOR is.

I don't think the LRB suffers from lack of humour. Maybe even too much of the wrong kind - as in the indulgence of Bennett but also the blokeishness of Burrow.

I don't know much about McNicol. I think I once met Spawls, at an LRB event. Does she go on as much as Friedell does about how ex-boyfriends are awful, Jane Austen is great for breaking up with awful ex-bfs, etc? That's a tiresome motif.

if “not totally out of order” isn’t an additional qualification what’s it doing there? it feels like a v constraining - “intellectually v sound and well written of course but simply beyond the pale, couldn’t possibly publish”.

and yes i think that the lrb can be incredibly po faced - certainly many of its core writers - (some of their sillinesses might be more easily exposed if they weren’t so sonorous) but this is an area in which we differ, which is part of an ongoing conversation, i feel! (and i still mean to go back to the lockwood with your critique in mind pf)

i mean that “not totally out of order” might just be a way of defining editorial voice, which ofc is necessary, but it leaves questions begging and also seems like not a good way of defining editorial voice!

I agree that 'out of order' confuses her point. It does seem like she's saying 'some things I wouldn't want to publish because I don't agree with them'. Which I suppose I can go along with.

What's an example of LRB writers being too solemn? I don't see it.

Here are some LRB writers who are in different ways comic, dry or ironic: O'Hagan, Lorentzen, Hofmann, Eagleton, Lockwood, Michael Wood, Burrow, Perry, Collini, Runciman, Mount, Mars-Jones. James Wood has a kind of sense of humour but can certainly come closer to solemnity (but less so now). Perry Anderson is, in a way, the least comic but even he has his own kind of sarcasm.

I don't like all those writers much but I don't think excess of seriousness is their problem.

FWIW I would suggest that if you think the LRB is an insular club (something many of us have felt at various times), then humour would tend to reinforce this, and flat seriousness would be the best way to cut through it.

It occurs to me that when he started out in about 1990, James Wood's high seriousness had such a rhetorical function: he was puritanically aloof from backslapping, logrolling UK literary culture.

the humour is a good point. immediately and without much reflection i would say there’s a silly and not at all funny sort of “tittering” literary humour that you notice most in the lrb podcasts, but which i think is present in the writing.

if you’re going to tell me that runciman isn’t unbearably solemn then we may differ on our basics. i would perhaps say that there is a rough space where i would put solemn, self-satisfied, pompous, self-regarding, which i would tend to put along with lacking in humour and that i think lanchester, for all his occasional tone of cumbersome levity, and a fortiori runciman exemplify this.

Fizzles, everything you're saying, to me, confirms the idea that there is *too much* humour, not too little.

The fact that these podcast people josh along chuckling together can't be a sign that the LRB is too solemn, can it?

Runciman unbearably solemn? I find that description incomprehensible. If anything I think he's too blokeish and informal.

Lanchester, again, clearly isn't solemn. He's very similar: blokeish, joshing, ironising - but not actually funny.

To understand what we're describing, we need to be able to posit what the alternative to this mode would look like. I think, again, that Perry Anderson is a relatively good example of the alternative: someone who IS almost always serious, and NEVER indulges the blokeishness.

In fact the NLR would be a much, much better example of a journal that IS solemn. To 99% of people it would be less entertaining than the LRB, though I can still find it entertaining at times.

Guess Mary-Kay Williams going explains why they've hired more women to write for it over the last couple of years.

i still need to write my "defence of bennett" i think (but not today as i am super busy w/non-writing stuff)

busy writing things like tolk = "2horny4elfs"

^^^the wit the lrb needs i feel we can all agree

Runciman unbearably solemn? I find that description incomprehensible. If anything I think he's too blokeish and informal.

so, i think the issue here is that these overlap for me. in that blokeishness = a self-serious male tone, incredibly pompous, which precludes the vulnerability from which self mocking and humour (and i mean humour as separate from self-mocking - allowing the subject and your approach to it to allow itself to be made fun of) can emerge.

but this i think is giving it all more analysis than it deserves, and we'd need to do some work on a shared framework to make any headway, though as discussed before there is a wider discussion to which it contributes.

i quite like the bennett yearly diary. probably for all the reasons i'm supposed to like it, gossipy parochial observation of the world with the background of bennett's experiences and history in letters and the arts and what i'll loosely call english society with a medium sized s. like the author it's become more frail over time, and that was particularly noticeable this time around, but i don't mind it particularly.

"in letters and the arts" -- including in particular the camp* green-room bitchiness of theatre-style gossip

*AB's relationship to camp is complex and somewhat reserved tho: i feel that he finds full-on high camp a bit tiresome and vulgar

Lost in all this again, but wondering why it's the Russians wot done it is a discussion of social media is nec. to be dismissed, thinking of Mueller and other US Gov reports, also why is favorable mention of Hofstader grounds for dismissal (not saying it's not, been a long time since I've read him)??

*in* a discussion of social media

Your favourite LRB writer Patricia Lockwood with main literary feature in the Guardian this weekend.

Unfortunately it's written by bilious reactionary Hadley Freeman.

I'd like to say that if I were in PL's position I'd refuse to be interviewed by HF, but I'm sure you don't get to make such choices.

yes i saw that. hadley freeman also covering herself in glory lashing out at the excellent women’s and gender diverse bookshop the second shelf is good timing as well. not sure how much of a choice you get but ew, do not want to read anything by hadley freeman even if it’s about My Favoruite LRB HERO Patricia Lockwood She Can Do No Wrong. (i haven’t read priest daddy and have no particular urge to - should i?)

I did read that a couple of days ago. HF was totally the wrong person. Not only bcz bigotry, but also she is the wrong person to talk to Lockwood about shitposting.

as i defended a runciman piece upthread i’m checking in to say uncharitably that mournful personal connection or no i don’t know where uk crits got the idea there is some kind of bottomless global appetite for larkin/kingsley anecdotage. it has to stop. however

Even now I shudder and moan involuntarily. M says: “Is it death again, or Mrs Thatcher?”

this is, eerily, exactly what i said when i saw the headline

(it was both, but mostly death)

The Lydia Davis "piece" in the last issue I received is abysmal toss:

Alarmed to see Lydia Davis has reached the Updike state of publishing any half-arsed thing she can think of (and is being abetted in this by editors and publishers). The rest of us do this sort of thing on twitter for free. pic.twitter.com/2JcQSz8DMX

— Caustic Cover Critic 📚 (@Unwise_Trousers) January 29, 2021

I concur.

i mean two of the many great things abt twitter are
A: that it delivers the not-even-half-assed in too-cheap-to-meter quantities (so we resent feeling we're paying for it from bluechecks)
B: some account choosing to call themselves like @posada_spunkah_666 is funnier and more pertinent for free than all the ppl hired by the grownup papers combined

Through twitter you see both i) what a waste of energy work is, we could all be doing something that's actual fun instead of paying rent. And ii) that despite this, we can still have fun.

my current project is to get across how corrosive the entire concept of writing for money is in general, while also getting paid to explore this

😃

Colm Toibin on Pope Francis: a) better than most Toibin, especially as he could report on events he'd attended in the 1980s; b) oddly inconclusive, in a typical Toibin / LRB way; c) ultimately seemed quite sceptical / critical towards the Pope -- whom even I tend to like.

My unasked for and banal opinion on Pope Francis- I like that he at least attempts to be a force for good more than malevolent reaction and obscurantism, it feels like a huge improvement on his predecessors. But on the other hand, he's the Pope lol

I'm enjoying that Toibin piece; I don't think his support for totalitarian regimes and the context in which his read-as-anti-homophobic statements were said are very well known.

John Lanchester talks to Patricia Lockwood about her new novel, No One is Talking About This (Bloomsbury)

is it your birthday soon, pinefox?

contributing ed and nethead, John Lanchester.

oh no

net buff

tear him, mark.

i got absolutely neathed at glastonbury in 2013 iirc

I don't know much about LRB contributor Lauren Oyler, but / and was surprised to read in the New Statesman that she has previously written scathingly about Patricia Lockwood. I would have guessed that they were quite similar. This review of Oyler's book made it sound bad, anyway. It was confusing as it sounded as though Oyler was bad in the way she criticised other people for being bad; as though she couldn't recognise the same tendencies in herself.

Those two books -- Oyler and Lockwood -- are being reviewed alongside one another, with Lockwood being preferred.

My Pope Francis opinion: he is good on twitter.

Oyler wrote a very negative review of Jia Tolentino's book which I thought was very poorly done (I haven't read Tolentino's book and have no opinion about it, I just found Oyler's review completely unconvincing!)

that review was...a thing. Oyler strikes me as v smart but the review got weirdly personal. I like Tolentino’s book, but it’s certainly not above criticism, but I found that review hard to follow at times. Her novel sounds sort of unpleasant to read to me!

That review was v mean girls

I really liked the latest diary - abolish the police, except replace 'the police' with 'schools':

It seemed obvious to me that despite what everyone said, schools were not primarily about education. Formal learning made up a minimal fraction of the activity there (and the part adults later find the least memorable). The real purpose and priority of the school system was to instil the habit of obedience, of deference to our superiors. Learning was to be discouraged if it interfered with this end.

LRB 4.2.2021:

William Davies on Brexitland: some insight into social identities.

Mike Jay on CIA / LSD: this feels like a zany Pynchonian story that comes up repeatedly.

Peter Geoghegan on FOI: useful and well done.

Namara Smith on Yaa Gyasi: this novel sounds bad.

Alex Harvey on Denis Johnson: this sounds pretty poor too - sort of cult of Bukowski stuff.

Thomas Meaney on Castro in Harlem: much better and more interesting.

Freya Johnston on Wollstonecraft: brings out her individuality, but puzzling to end it with such swingeing attacks on feminism now.

Nicholas Spice on Hans Keller: a few good details and brings back some Third Programme / Radio 3 culture.

David Runciman on Larkin: I think better of this than others - because ultimately it's a quiet tribute to DR's father, W.G. Runciman, and that last column or so is decently done.

Samuel Earle on Carrere: sounds an odd writer.

Marina Warner on saints and angels: it's funny how typecast MW is, how she has spent decades reviewing things about fairy tales and saints, and she's still happily doing it and telling us that in lockdown, we need fairy tales more than ever. She's as solid and repetitive as an Alan Shearer or Leon Osman.

LRB 18.2.2021:

Thomas Powers on Robert Stone: it's embarrassing in a way what an old-school all-American male Thomas Powers seems to be. He writes about men having instincts like wolves. He talks some nonense in this review, in his resonant rhetorical way so it will go unquestioned. One of the worst things he does is, again to an embarrassing degree, repeat, as if it's a new idea, the very discredited idea that 'the Vietnam war was really about the effect it had on America' (not the Vietnamese). People were criticizing Vietnam films for saying this 40 years ago!!

Tony Wood on Russia: good to see him being pretty uncompromising on corruption and not over-complicating it.

Andy Beckett on LA in the 1960s: sound. Great Elvis anecdote.

Most of the rest doesn't appeal, but I will keep going.

Very flawed by its treatment of the great John McDonnell MP, but nonetheless a country mile ahead of the LRB's treatment of the same material:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii127/articles/oliver-eagleton-vicious-horrible-people

One of the worst things he does is, again to an embarrassing degree, repeat, as if it's a new idea, the very discredited idea that 'the Vietnam war was really about the effect it had on America' (not the Vietnamese). People were criticizing Vietnam films for saying this 40 years ago!!

I don't get this. Powers is characterising the debates going on amongst US intellectuals of that time - surely the fact that ppl found this in US Vietnam war movies confirms, rather than denies, that this was the case?

That's a good argument.

But my sense was that TP endorses the claim, as a continuing insight, rather than saying: "This is a limited and ethnocentric thing that people used to say in those days, but we have now tried to move beyond it."

Finishing the TP review - I'm stunned by how bad it is; how portentous about inanity. You could say that it resembles Hemingway, or writing about Hemingway. It feels like a throwback of about 35 years to a time when men were men and they wrote about Carver and Mailer.

One way of indicating my incredulity is to say -- this review would bear incredulous reviewing by Patricia Lockwood.

Given (as I think Mark S likes to point out) how much instant opinion is out there now, I'm a bit surprised if people online haven't already demolished this.

Andrew O'Hagan on M K Wilmers: really bad. Horribly smug, self-satisfied writing in O'H's usual manner of trying to go over the top and provoke. His sentence 'I knew then that we would never be married' - is preposterous, a failure all round.

But my sense was that TP endorses the claim, as a continuing insight, rather than saying: "This is a limited and ethnocentric thing that people used to say in those days, but we have now tried to move beyond it."

I parsed it as descriptive, not passing judgement either way. I would hope most LRB readers can figure out what a morally reprehensible pov it is by themselves, but then they DO also publish that dude who was all "Japan should get over the bomb".

Given (as I think Mark S likes to point out) how much instant opinion is out there now, I'm a bit surprised if people online haven't already demolished this.

I'd imagine no one much has bothered because no one cares about Robert Stone? Was really surprised that this was the lead article over, say, Olivia Butler.

re Japan: is that Edward Luttwak?

I would hope most LRB readers can figure out what a morally reprehensible pov it is by themselves

Quite possibly many would think as I, and it seems you, do -- but still, Powers himself was explicitly saying that this was an example of Stone's 'genius'!

I looked Powers / LRB up on Twitter and indeed it seemed that no-one had commented at all.

I agree that it's odd the status that Powers seems to get. Amusingly and naturally, he turns out to be writing a book about ... his father.

Still, I admit that his biography makes him historically a more substantial and veteran figure than I knew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Powers

It's a strange way to go about reviewing a biography to simply retell the story the book tells in your own words without saying anything much about the quality of the book itself. It's not even clear whether Toibin is telling you things he knows, or thinks he does, about Bacon or simply regurgitating facts he's gleaned from this book. What's the point?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n05/colm-toibin/open-in-a-scream

It's a strange way to go about reviewing a biography to simply retell the story the book tells in your own words without saying anything much about the quality of the book itself

this is lrb house style, no? "i am three times more knowledgeable on the subject than the author of this book i shall barely deign to mention."

toibin has form for this:

the element in that wound me up most: he's arsey abt the biographer's mundane attempts at art crit but while he quotes some much better crit (the generally good wayne kostenbaum, the reliably great gary indiana) he delivers none at all of his own, no toibinesque insight or perspective

i mean i think the precis IS the point -- you read this so you don't have to read a full 900-page warhol biog, i use LRB this way a fair amount -- but if that's all you're doing you don't really get to cast sneery shade at the person who handed you the materials you're boiling down imo

― mark s, Saturday, 19 September 2020 19:30 (five months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think you're right. I actually stopped reading it a few years ago and this may have been one of the contributing factors.

ah! thanks mark,

i wouldn't call it LRB "house style" exactly -- but i do think it's an element in the service they offer

(and sometimes and in some hands a useful one!)

incidentally, the Gary Indiana review of that Warhol bio in Harper's mag is searing.

lol yes it's terrific: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/06/always-leave-them-wanting-less-andy-warhol/

Really enjoyed that

GI has written for the LRB a few times, they shd use him more often

Adam Shatz on Algeria: I learned from this, about the way that Algeria was to France rather like a cross between Vietnam and Northern Ireland, say. I think that it's rather like the Wollstonecraft review in becoming needlessly, and less interestingly because more generically, present-oriented at the end.

Pretty much finished a lot of that issue this afternoon. Found the later bits of the Shatz more interesting just because of how France seem to be taking steps -- however half-hearted and awkward -- to some kind of recognition to what they did in Algeria. Also interesting overview on how Algeria plays in French culture.

Really enjoyed Lockwood on Ferrante, partly because she didn't like her latest that much.

It was a especially good issue -- although maybe because I haven't read for pleasure that much since the start of the year. Andy Beckett on LA, the story of Cigarettes and their decline (which is more complicated than you think), as is the history of churches pre-, during and post-Soviet union as they live in photographs, all the way through to histories of Jewish outside-insiders and Daniel Trilling's write-up of old Hackney community projects and their archives. Just one page after the other.

Jenny Turner on Octavia Butler's work was the first piece I went to. Worthwhile though sad 'cuz I can't remember much of Butler's writing. I should revisit, but when.

Onto the next and Terry Castle on Patricia Highsmith. I wanted more analysis on why Highsmith is so good (she was though I haven't read enough). This is the downside of reviewing biographes of the subject (not just the one under review but the two previous ones were discussed as well), like just use as an excuse to riff on the subject.

LRB 18.2.2021: Unusually bad, unenjoyable issue.

A few things I've mentioned before, like the bad Thomas Powers and O'Hagan articles.

I don't much like Jenny Turner, but Butler is a major figure who deserves extended treatment. And the article did contain some noteworthy things, like the aphorism:

There’s nothing new
under the sun
but there are new suns.

I think that's quite stimulating. The article also shows (though it could state more clearly) that one of Butler's strengths was to imagine aliens as really other, not just as exotic humanoids.

Friedell on schizophrenia: bleak but at least factual and quite clear.

Lockwood: I read about a page and decided my life would be happier if I didn't read any more.

Nocilla Trilogy: at first this sounded like the kind of contemporary avant-garde thing that Tim eruditely likes. But the more I read, the more it just sounded rubbish.

Even Michael Wood was unusually below par.

Bad, evasive article on cigarettes.

LA, ancient cities and Russian churches: fine (I think I already remarked that the Elvis anecdote in the first was a highlight).

Frank Ramsey: strange hothouse / prodigy Cambridge-centric account of the kind you don't so much see anymore. I didn't generally understand the philosophy.

Hackney Museum: mostly bad.

Lorna Finlayson on schools: partly convincing in that I agree that people don't seem to learn much at school, but unlike her I'm not convinced that they learn obedience either.

After giving that issue away I opened the one (17.12.2020) with the first Perry Anderson EU article. This will all take ages.

I found the schizophrenia article hard work. Clear and factual, as you say, but almost devoid of compassion. A tough read.

I'm so behind, that I'm pretending the a huge chunk of back issues don't exist. I'm enjoying the Pankhurst article in the latest issue (certainly not shy of offering an opinion on the text discussed).

Lorna Finlayson on schools: partly convincing in that I agree that people don't seem to learn much at school, but unlike her I'm not convinced that they learn obedience either.

Sure there are some kids who play truant or don't study or whatever, but how many will end up in the system anyway, doing some 9-5 job or other, compared to how many forget all the world capitals or the causes of the first world war or the pythagorean theorem? Obviously it's not *just* schools indoctrinating people, the whole system is geared to perpetuate itself; still they are a large part of it.

Chinaski: I agree about that article.

"how many will end up in the system anyway, doing some 9-5 job or other, compared to how many forget all the world capitals or the causes of the first world war or the pythagorean theorem"

Aren't these the same people?

I don't think people do a 9 to 5 job because they're obedient, but because they need money to survive.

Started on LRB 17.12.2021, reading Lanchester on Neanderthals. This has been discussed before - perhaps by Fizzles the Neanderthal? - so I will be brief:

Lanchester can communicate. He can inform - including, I suppose, about subjects that are quite technical. I suppose this is a skill.

But I hate his ready recourse to vulgarity and how the LRB lets him get away with this (or, presumably, anything).

And this article heavily includes a bad feature: positing 'what you think you know' and then saying it's wrong, without any evidence that his reader does think it.

There is also a strange contradictory moment near the end when he says, in effect: 'Neanderthals are utterly different from us, so it's *amazing* to think that science shows that we are part-Neanderthal'. But surely this scientific finding would suggest that Neanderthals are *not* entirely different from us, and therefore it becomes less amazing. We need to think of them as part of our make-up rather than a strange 'other' - and if we do that, then it's not strange that they're part of our make-up?

Possibly these points were alreeady made by Fizzles and others.

Lastly, btw, Lanchester's article ends surprisingly badly, with a sentence that doesn't have a main verb. I understand that rhetorically we use such formulations all the time, especially in speech; but one would think that (especially from an ... experienced author) the last sentence of a quite long article would want to end on a resonant note, not an abbreviated one that feels off-key.

I realise LRB 7.12.2021 is old news, but it's turning out pretty well.

Lanchester was at least readable. Julian Bell on art history is serious, conceptual, stimulating; gets too abstract for me, but then ends by appealing away from abstraction.

Rubert Beale on vaccines is the clearest thing on the pandemic and vaccines that I've ever read.

And Perry Anderson, 'The European Coup', Part 1 of the series, the one that Fizzles so admired ... I'm only about 3pp in and it often goes to places whose relevance is hard to see, but it's pure PA in its immense erudition, its love of intellectual history, political thought, its cool exposés of the histories of politicians we've never heard of. Remarkable.

Lots of us have been amused by INVASION OF THE SPACE INVADERS for a long time, but I didn't know that Tom Shippey (much discussed here) had reviewed it along with DICING WITH DRAGONS by Ian Livingstone, a book I've owned for about 35 years.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n24/tom-shippey/vidkids

I watched the film of High Wind in Jamaica recently - had forgotten that a young Martin Amis played the oldest child, who hilariously falls to his death out of a window near the end of the film.

Spoiler!

LRB 17.12.2020, concluded:

Neal Ascherson on the German Revolution: I never much relish reading NA, but I did seem to learn something here, about an important period.

Eric Foner on Lincoln: OK.

Rosemary Hill on Con MPs' wives: utterly dreadful people, shouldn't be covered here.

Alison Light on 1930s poltergeists: for me this raised a familiar issue: when people write about things like mediums or ghosts (especially when they're safely in the past), they don't like to be clear about the status of those alleged phenomena. The reason this book's subject is noteworthy at all is that it's outlandish: we don't believe in poltergeists - do we? If we did, and thought they were quite normal, then we wouldn't need the book. So did the poltergeists exist? Or if they didn't (as most of us presumably intuitively assume), what was really going on? That's the question Light doesn't seriously acknowledge. Saying things like 'the woman who claimed to be a medium was troubled', or even 'the 1930s was an anxious period' (as the book does), is evasive, unless you actually believe that those facts could cause paranormal effects. If they can't, then, again: what was really going on?

David Trotter on Mullan's Dickens: not great: Mullan's book sounds relatively banal, if probably readable, and DT spends half the review in classic LRB fashion autonomously developing theories of his own.

L O Rowlands on Virginie Despentes: informative about an aspect of literature, I suppose, but not my cup of tea.

Raban on Italian landings: I feared that this could be self-indulgent family memoir, but must admit it was a more serious historical account of war than that.

Wood on Dietrich: slim; spread too thin across all those films perhaps.

Celia Paul on being a late painter's one-time gf: unusually dire even by bad LRB standards.

LRB 4.3.2021: promising.

Adam Mars-Jones on HINTON: good review, with AMJ's characteristic factual pedantry, though I will never understand the science.

Susan Pedersen on Sylvia Pankhurst: I'm only halfway through but enjoyably rambunctious and critical attitude to the author's vast (924-pp) tome.

I finished that review. Dreadful!

Someone should tell this reviewer: Not everything is always about you.

Rosemary Hill: London's West End, Oxford Street: OK but perhaps too slanted towards aristocrats and not the amount of ordinary work going on in this supposed 'pleasure district'?

Colin Kidd on Scottish independence: quite informative (and also quite familiar) - though this writer is very parti pris. When nationalists (including dear friends of mine) talk as though nationalism is the only option I am sceptical, but I am also a bit dubious of CK's always venting the same opinion on the other side (albeit that is now 'devo max' or whatever, rather than a conservative Anglophile Unionism). Quite insightful, though, about what unionism and nationalism tend to share.

Colm Toibin on Francis Bacon: is the LRB ever not carrying a long essay by Colm Toibin on Francis Bacon?

Just read the Terry Castle piece on Highsmith in that issue, astonishingly irritating.

This review of an Italian communist children lit writer's life and work was strong.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n06/tim-parks/have-you-seen-my-hand

The LRB seldom tips you onto interesting fiction you haven't heard of before.

Do we have our first mention of shitposting in the LRB's article on Ubuweb?

I finished that review. Dreadful!

cant tell which this review was?

Pedersen on Holmes on Pankhurst.

ah ok, you seemed very positive when you started

someone shd tell the reviewer that everything is about me

You're right, Mark, on both counts.

I finished enough of LRB 4.3.2021.

Terry Castle on Highsmith: I understand James M's irritation but actually this came through for me. TC had done the work of reading the other biographies, knew her stuff, was able to explain what was bad about Richard Bradford's (has any modern biographer been more frequently deplored?). Highsmith is one writer I know I ought to read.

Rupert Beale on viruses vaccines: I failed to comprehend this.

Stephen Sedley on compensation culture: good. I quite like SS's old-school brisk style. He is quite sound.

Tom Stevenson on war in space: outstanding! Astoundingly knowledgeable and well written. The sections on whether satellites are really in space became so thrilling.

Clare Bucknell at National Gallery: like a lot of art writing this seemed just to be talking round the art and struggling for something to say.

Francis Gooding on anthropology: informative, on Boas, Mead, Hurston et al. Actually a good model of a review with clear beginning, middle and end.

Rebecca Armstrong on The Aeneid: didn't love it but at least it cleaves closely to the text.

Thomas Jones on Bill Gates: takes the easy option of jeering at Gates, rather than (like Bastani, Britain's best political commentator) actually taking an interest in the practical solutions he proposes.

Michael Wood on Coe on Wilder: helpfully focused after a vague start. I realised that the good reason that MW reviewed this is that he knows Wilder's cinema better than anyone else at the LRB.

Tessa Hadley on Bette Howland: didn't much convince: some flashes of good writing amid quite tedious stuff, but the late work indeed sounds awful.

John Foot on Italian academic corruption: this slightly chimes with my own experience of Italian academia. It's annoying, though, to see him and later letter writers say that it's just as bad in the UK. It isn't. In my experience patronage actually isn't a big part of the UK academy: it makes for a sharp contrast when you go to Europe and struggle for a minute to understand how they do things.

Susan McKay on the DUP: a good reminder of how nutty they can be, and interesting on the future - I hadn't realised that the old prophecy of Catholic demographic takeover was actually coming closer to reality.

LRB 1.4.2021:

Collini on meritocracy: really excellent.

Neal Ascherson's presence makes me think: is he, in fact, the most frequent contributor of full-length articles to the LRB? Say every 4 or 5 issues?

Rupert Beale on viruses vaccines: I failed to comprehend this.

Me on every piece about the virus that isn't an explainer for dummies. :(

1.4.2021:

Ascherson on Colley is actually strong, and unusual for an LRB essay in being almost entirely a dedicated review of the book in question.

Katherine Harloe on Classics: quite good and informative, and usefully sceptical perhaps about the polemic of the book she's reviewing.

Dani Garavelli on Scotland: I still barely understand what the issues are re: the misconduct of the investigation into Alex Salmond. It's odd how the writer winds up talking as though the cause of independence is receding - only a true believer in it could believe that.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n08/emily-witt/eels-on-cocaine

Emily Witt -- the first v online person that I can remember writing for LRB -- in turn writing about the latest of a batch of v online ppl making waves at the LRB. Nice.

I wrote about the 'satirical' front facing comedy videos https://t.co/5QEGNkUuSs

— Rachel Connolly (@RachelConnoll14) April 16, 2021

I wonder if this is the Alice Spawls influence; I've definitely felt a shift since she took over

The Krugman article was probably even more baffling to me than the covid one was to pinefox. As an economics ignoramus I should perhaps then shut up. Nevertheless: is there any evidence that economics can make anything other than retroactive predictions?

Good question.

so, a couple of things on that krugman article - which was excellent, I thought. first, I guess, a partial defence of economists, then some fizzles-type personal rambling almost certainly tl;dr.

• yes, i think economics as an area of study is useful. put it this way, i probably wouldn't want anyone who was in charge of investing money on a national or international scale not to understand trade and trade constraints, what the likely effect of printing money (monetary policy) would be, or what the effect of raising or reducing taxes (fiscal policy) would be. also someone who knows how best to invest money to benefit a particular sector or cohort of society, or indeed a country. Apologies for the bracketed explanations - I often forget them so i figure other people probably do as well. economists seem to me pretty good at a boring, perhaps obvious level, at saying 'if you print a fuckton of money now, you will get inflation, and that will devalue people's wages, but help pay off debt'.

• i get the feeling much of 'economists' has got conflated with Chicago school ideology, that is to say the friedman, hayek model. One thing I think Tooze's article does well is dramatize the interaction of ideology with economics in a single person in a specific historical context. Even alone explaining why neo-Keynesian is a bit of a misnomer was useful. The Economist is a great example of why economists come across so badly - an angle which can allow phrases like how to optimise human capital (so close to 'cattle' if you slur it!), or create stability (via right wing dictators in developing economies eg), feels utterly disgusting to anyone with any moral sensibility. But you don't get much done without a sense of the movement of capital.

• there is a significant issue, defining the last decade and so far this one, to do with low productivity, stagnant wages, savings and investment, which plays out at a global scale, that economists can't explain. individual economists believe they can, but in the aggregate economists do not have a solid answer or prescription. so it's understandable that there's a frustration with economics, but i'm not sure that you wouldn't want economists to be working at that question. and if someone is working at that question, they are in some way an economist. not sure it's about predictions as such, other than saying 'we believe this behaviour will generate this outcome'. in other words, if we believe this a problem worth working at, then we believe we need economists.

i quite like bataille's definition in the accursed share: the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space wait no wrong page, that economics is 'the *general* problems that are linked to the movement of energy on the globe.'

A movement is produced on the surface of the globe that results from the circulation of energy at this point in the universe. The economic activity of men appropriates this movement, making use of the resulting possibilities for certain ends. But this movement has a pattern and laws with which, as a rule, those who use them and depend on them are unacquainted.

but i would strongly recommend JK Galbraith's excellent book Money for less esoteric coverage.

for myself, i've been struggling since 2008 to try and explore to my own satisfaction the political/economic space that might roughly be defined by the polar scale (social democracy <-> marxism). it was clear from both the causes of and response to the GFC that this represented a clear crisis in social democracy and third way politics, specifically for New Labour in the UK (separately damaged by Iraq), but more widely as a political philosophy. The central crux being, could the principle that maximising business receipts in order to enable widespread social equality (including people not responsible for those business receipts) be sustained as a responsible socialist political approach.

(i have an incredibly facile political philosophy, which is that everyone, no matter what their station, deserves good quality housing (good quality here representing longevity and robustness, as well as quality of life aspects like light and space), good quality education - no one should get a worse education than someone else because of their social background, good quality transport - you should not need a car to get where you're going, any opportunity, whether of leisure or income, at any destination should be available to you at a small, affordable fee - health, you should not have a lower life expectancy or health expectations than someone with more money. i would add to transport a wider sense of communications infrastructure like equality of internet accessibility.)

I see that set of principles as fundamentally socialist, but the question of how you achieve them is not easy in a capitalist society.

Tooze is on record as being a Keynesian, ie fundamentally a social democrat Keynesian, but who has said that he feels the best critique of social democracy, which social democracy and economics more generally needs to accommodate and comprehend, is marxist. again, back to my more simplistic world, i struggle between three views:

*- social democracy, properly delivered, can deliver social equality in a relative space of capitalist freedom. it needs to avoid PPP, and should have a bias towards workers rights and social welfare, but all of these can be managed within a social democratic framework
*- social democracy has a fundamental tendency towards creating business-politics power frameworks, which favour business. ultimately this creates the conditions - when push comes to shove as it were - of austerity, or to Tooze's article's point: where wall street is bailed out, but main street gets insufficient support (the basis of krugman's conversion). this overall logic means that marxist approaches to capitalist and social structures need to be enforced (to quote Benjamin: 'The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics put to its political views as well. It is one reason for the later breakdown.')
*- there is no way, given current democratic expectations and behaviours, that marxism or strong socialism will ever get a look in as things stand, and the route to proper socialism is necessarily via social democracy

the interplay between these views results in me being sometimes a bit melt-y, sometimes a bit guillotine-y, sometimes a bit between: ie Melt Guillotine is the name of my band.

Tooze's article, following Krugman's slo-mo damascene conversion plays out the arguments in that space over the same period of time. for me, it's a very useful exploration of those dynamics.

Tooze himself is interesting, as I'm never *entirely* convinced by him, but he's doing something very interesting. He's trying to do history as it happens and make it not journalism. So he had a real map-territory problem (in the Borgesian sense), where basically his editor had to tell him to STOP WRITING CRASHED FINISH ALREADY as he was trying to incorporate Syria and Turkey. But it seems to me that this struggles with the notion of historical materialism - the critical balancing point where things, for reasons impossible to know in the moment and impossible to recapture later, could go either way - he creates developing historical narratives that explain why the moment could never be any other way.

He seems to me extremely psychologically embarrassed and defensive by left wing critiques of his work, and would like to forestall those by confessing strongly on the left-wing side, without quite being of the Devil's Party (as in the good side, cf Blake's Milton). He is very good at pointing out that the political economy of Hitler's Germany shows why it's ludicrous for neoliberals to claim that anti-racism is intrinsic as a consequence of their approach rather than the reverse. In general he's quite good at standing outside the inherent 'Economist' logics of economists, but he can't help inheriting all of the mechanics of capitalism when he's explaining the mechanics of history - tho much of his intelligence lies in being able to separate the two out. Most evident in this is his commitment to understanding and exploring the economics of climate change and the economic frameworks for delivering climate action.

For the first time for economics climate change is presenting an emergency context which rational actor or incomplete information models or even stochastic general whatevers - the attempt to connect specific economic examples with wider macro principles - are totally insufficient to deal with.

So, Tooze himself, not quite of the angels, but one of the closest things we've got to a public intellectual these days (not really very public, but with a wide-ranging desire to engage with the aesthetics and mechanics of 'the movement of energy across the globe.'

Sorry, not just tl;dr, but barely coherent. have it.

Nevertheless: is there any evidence that economics can make anything other than retroactive predictions?

― Scheming politicians are captivating, and it hurts (ledge), Monday, April 19, 2021 6:36 AM (yesterday) bookmark flag link

typically the goal is to do counterfactual prediction ('what would happen if we did x policy instead of y?') rather than unqualified prediction ('will there be a financial crisis in the next 5 years?'). since you only get to observe the policy that actually gets implemented, the prediction is never really borne out. we don't know what the employment rate would have been in 2015 if the federal reserve hadn't raised rates in 2012, so we can't say what the effect was even retroactively

xp fizzles - i sympathize with your frustration in attempting to square your politics with interest in economics. a main challenge is that a lot of left writers on economics are bad. i haven't read him in a while, but i really enjoy chris dillow whose blog is still active https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/

the Tooze piece is pretty unsatisfying to me, imho the narrative of radicalization is mostly bogus. i've been reading paul krugman semi-regularly for over a decade (and have read all the nineties stuff--despite what the piece might suggest it holds up and is cracking good writing) and there's a steady methodological throughline mixed with an intensifying frustration at republicans. he basically wrote the same column "obama pass another stimulus" twice a week for 6 years

right, interesting on your view on the essay. on chris dillow, yes he’s great - in fact i was bugging his last but one post on the leisured classes and the division of labour just the other day on twitter.

more generally, on an lrb point, they clearly and rightly felt political economics was too important to rely on lanchester for, and tooze is a good consistent addition to their roster.

(perhaps worth noting that it may have been lanchester who had a hand in that - they seem to get on ok and co presented a few things in the post-GFC analysis industry)

just on chris dillow - he’s v much of the third camp: that the route to a society guided by marxist thought is via social democracy.

typically the goal is to do counterfactual prediction ('what would happen if we did x policy instead of y?') rather than unqualified prediction ('will there be a financial crisis in the next 5 years?'). since you only get to observe the policy that actually gets implemented, the prediction is never really borne out.

Counterfactual prediction is pretty much what the hard sciences deal in so I don't have a problem with that. Obviously you can't run randomised double blind controlled trials with a country's economy but you can look at other countries and other historical events, what I was hoping for was some evidence using the available data of whether economists' predictions are ever reliably borne out.

But maybe that's not the whole story, Fizzles you do a great job of explaining why economists are necessary for the broad picture even if they can't make detailed and accurate predictions - unlike this guy I found yesterday (https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/what-economics-can-and-cant-do/ ) who while trying to defend economists more or less admits that their predictions are of little value, they view outcomes through a narrow lens, and their decisions are unavoidably value laden and political.

Re: prediction, meteorology, for example, is surely a legitimate and robust science but it can barely forecast if it will rain tomorrow. Nevertheless it can describe broad trends and offer guarded predictions. The problem there is that the models, though in all likelihood accurate in terms of behaviour, are necessarily incomplete, the climate is a chaotic system and tiny differences in the model will lead to huge differences in outcome. It seems unlikely that the economy is chaotic - could someone spending a Peso in Mexico cause a depression in America? - but either way if economists are still relying on things like rational actor then their models are not just incomplete but wholly inaccurate.

Good work Fizzles. My feeble brane was only able to absorb the gist of Tooze's article via Will Davies' point that the radicalisation of Gary Neville is precisely analogous to that of Krugman.

I think I'm about 4 issues behind Fizzles, so certainly not ready to read his analysis till August.

i quite like bataille's definition in the accursed share: the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space wait no wrong page

Hahahaha.

I think that another point that contributes to people's animus against economics as a discipline is that there's a popular misapprehension of it as a hard science - which a lot of economists take no great pains to dispel. So when predictions fail to come true ppl reasonably feel gipped. But if you view it as more akin to political theory or sociology it starts to make more sense - I mean Francis Fukuyama built an entire reputation around a now totally disproven thesis and that dude somehow still has a career.

Economic experts have historically supported bad or questionable policies in the US. They are regularly trotted out to support cutting taxes (especially taxes on capital gains), reducing regulation, reducing government intervention in the economy in general, opposing minimum wage increases, reducing barriers to free trade, etc. By and large these positions also seem to benefit the class of capitalist business owners, perhaps not coincidentally. Taken to an extreme, these policies have not always been so beneficial. We still have taxes on capital gains for instance that are lower than taxes on income from work. It's not clear that this policy could be maintained for so long without cover from economists. Economists also seemed to be lopsidedly in favor of for example increasing trade with China in the '90s, which due to the scale and pace of its expansion, had some harmful effects on US industry, which were pooh-poohed at the time. There are many such examples.

Good post O. Nate !

Economics is pure pseudoscience and its total domination of the political sphere is 90% of why we're fucked as a species.

Economists that are endorsed by the American political class are horrible yeah, of course, what do you expect?

There's also economists who advocate for everything from a left welfare state model to marxism though, and I see no reason to discount them.

Good point. Also most of these problems are related to macro-economics. My impression is that micro is a more fertile area of research and actually more of what actual economists focus on.

i think o nate’s post is otm to a large extent but imma springboard off it to try to make some points in defence of economics to explain why i like it despite those things and also clarify what i was trying to say about counterfactuals and prediction. extreme tl;dr strictly 4 my lrb homies ilx made me split this up into 3 posts lol

imho what’s relevant isn’t the historical q of whether economists have supported bad/questionable/good policies in the US in past but the potential for economics to provide answers to the question ‘which policies should we support?’ in the present and future

there are economic arguments that favour right wing policies and ones that favour left wing policies. even if you rule out all right wing policies on ethical/ideological grounds, there are a lot of different mutually exclusive policies within the set of left policies to consider that you might want to use economics to compare

take two recently hot utopian leftish policy proposals: the universal basic income and the job guarantee. can we do both, or are they in tension? what are their costs and consequences? how would different groups of the population be affected?

it’s not just that economics is a helpful tool in answering those questions: any answer to those questions is by definition economics. if those questions don’t interest you because you have used first principles ethical introspection to decide that one policy is superior regardless of its costs or consequences, then ok fine, but you’ve defined the problem away. anyone with doubt or curiosity has no choice but to do economics, the trick is to do it “well”

if historically economists were most influential in providing arguments in favour of right wing policies, that’s interesting as a matter of record, but it’s not super relevant if I’m a left wing person who wants to think about the consequences of different left wing policies today. physicists at CERN use the same theory of physics used to build the atomic bomb, not because they want to kill people but because it’s useful for multiple purposes

so the question is: is economics a logical straight jacket that locks you into arguing for right wing policies?

in some sense the answer to that is: yes. classical economic theory is this beautiful mathematical edifice that starts from some pretty innocuous-seeming axioms (‘if someone has the choice between 3 apples and 2 oranges and 2 applies and 3 oranges and they choose the former then they must value a third apple over a third orange’) and then suddenly you’re proving that the optimal tax on capital is zero. the intellectual rigor can be dazzling to young impressionable/budding contrarian-sociopathic minds that experience it. since the response of many non-economists is to make emotional pleas against the conclusions rather than to argue for alternative premises, it tends to cement the perception in the minds of young economists of their tribe as cold logical uncomfortable truth-tellers

but classical economic theory isn’t all right-wing; it’s a weird mix (this ‘weird mix’ is one of my preferred pet definitions of neoliberalism). it contains within it arguments in favour of left wing policies, too. ill give three examples

1. the assumption of marginal decreasing utility implies that taking a dollar from the rich and giving it to the poor increases overall welfare and therefore justifies redistribution. the classical theory of public finance as laid out by economists like Anthony Atkinson in the 1960s treats the problem maximizing egalitarian social welfare using taxes transfers and other instruments as an optimization problem solved by calculus. it’s full of fun results like “you should tax the single richest person in the economy at a rate of 100%” and extremely relevant to any socialist who wants to think about how government ought to go about funding itself

2. theories of firms with increasing returns to scale support antitrust, nationalization or regulation of industry. under increasing returns to scale, small firms can’t enter the market to compete down prices and there is a tendency to monopoly or oligopoly. the work of economists like recent nobel prize winner Jean Tirole (and the entire field of empirical industrial organization) uses more modern models, but the starting point is always from a model where competitive forces are absent and so the governments involvement can at least in theory improve on status quo

3. the same theory which supports free trade in goods (which parts of the left have opposed historically but not consistently) is equally supportive of free migration of labour/open borders. it’s actually exactly the same theory, you just relabel it. for an accessible recent paper arguing for open borders in a mainstream academic outlet, see Michael Clemens’ “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?”

(btw, many libertarians dislike classical economic theory for this very reason. people like hayek or von mises saw these ideas being used in their own time to justify the new deal and the great society and tried to theoretically disarm it using arguments that stressed the impossibility of humans ever understanding economics enough for government interventions to have consequences. I’ve encountered leftists making similar arguments: economics is impossible, so rather than try we should just apply pure socialist principles. my personally take is that this is doomed to incoherence. inevitably at some point the more pragmatic economic arguments will be irresistible to even the most principled comrade)

if there is a reason why historically economists in the United States tend to have been more vocal in their support of the conservative policies that classical economic theory supports, and more quiet on its left wing side, it’s something sociological or perhaps historically-contingent.

indeed you can look to other countries or periods where the opposite dynamic took hold: in Sweden, economists like Gunnar Myrdal, Olof Palme and Rudolph Meidner built unprecedentedly lavish welfare states that nonetheless were exposed to international free trade and encouraged capital investment. (the theory was that international competition would weed out all but the most productive industries in Sweden, who would then grow to take a larger share of the economy, which would provide a larger tax base for the welfare state—this is exactly the answer that you get when you study free trade under models with increasing returns to scale). even the more radical elements of the “Meidner plan” that included worker ownership of firms and a transition path to socialism were heavily influenced by economic theory; the institutions were designed carefully to preserve incentives to produce the means which were distributed. Sweden, like the US, also had a rightward turn in the late 20th century, and as a consequence of not following through with the Meidner plan now has sky high inequality in capital ownership (although it has a relatively a low degree of inequality along other dimensions). but they got to that part by not listening to economists enough. so i think historical extrapolation is of limited use

so far I’ve only mentioned classical economics. in classical economic theory prices are flexible, transactions frictionless, each agent is “atomistic” (and so any one person can’t influence prices) and information is “perfect” or evenly distributed across all agents. modern economics is defined by departures from the classical features. wages and prices are sticky, transactions are the result of costly searching bargaining and contracting, agents are “granular” (think of a systematically important financial institution like Goldman Sachs) and information is asymmetric.

classical economics is a wrapped-up topic, now preserved in textbooks and lapped up by precocious sociopathic teens like your young flopsons. all economics in economic journals in the last 3 decades features departures from classical economics. many papers consider the classical model as a baseline, examine some patterns of economic data it can’t explain, and then discuss various departures that can rationalize them, and try to decide among them

(this is not just lipstick on a pig. the departures can be drastic, and in some cases there are so many of them at once that no resemblance to the original remains. the impression Tooze gives of modern new Keynesian models as being classical models with one or two slight differences was true for a while but no longer so. virtually any economic model can be achieved by applying enough departures and state of the art macro models are Frankenstein’s monsters. (this doesn’t mean they’re good.) also, it is hard. only the brightest people work on it, the rest of us fiddle around with applications and other things. the difference between modern mainstream economists and people like post-keynesians is that the latter don’t write down models. they’re more like a mix of a humanities professors (read long manuscripts and argue about what Keynes or Sraffra really meant) and business journalists who use informal verbal arguments and casual analysis of data (usually eyeballing time series charts). most “post” Keynesian ideas were first written down as actual models by mainstreamers. google Emmanuel Farhi on the Cambridge Capital Controversy or Ivan Werning on Minsky are two recent examples u can watch youtubes of)

modern economics contains even more arguments for left wing policies. in frictional or monopsonistic labour markets, minimum wages can raise both wages and employment. in health insurance markets with asymmetric information, single-payer can reduce premiums and expand access. in economies with rigid prices and wages, countercyclical fiscal policy is effective at stabilizing employment during recessions. the triumph of modern economic theory is mechanism design, which can be interpreted as the study of algorithms for allocation of goods by non-market means. some computer scientists and economists have a conference where they try to use it to allocate things like social housing or slots in good public schools more fairly than the status quo of rationing with lotteries, and some people have semi-seriously joked that it could bring back central planning (although in a much more decentralized way, where the planner “designs” the rules of a game that members of society then play)

however, the arguments of modern economics are much less decisive than their classical counterparts. there are no provocative simplistic bangers like “open all borders, set minimum wages to 0, set capital gains tax to zero, nationalize the steel industry.” theorems feature many more qualifications. minimum wages can raise employment, but only up to a point. up to which point? it’s hard to say. it depends on which model you use, and also on features of the labour market.

for this reason, economics is increasingly empirical. many economists double as statisticians. (btw, there’s a huge internal debate in the profession about whether this process has gone too far, with some people arguing we’ve given up our roots as people who use powerful theories that make stark predictions to be mere bean counters. the “empiricist” side is winning, but its a struggle every graduate student probably has at least 2 committee members on either side of)

we left the “eden” of classical theory and its weird ideological mix of policies endorsed with logical certainty, and are now cast into a fallen plane where no one quite knows which model to use and therefore which policies to pursue. contemporary economists, especially those of younger generations, are more “epistemically humble”. they’re also, cautiously, more left wing

in light of this situation, modern empirical work mostly tries to do counterfactual policy analysis in the hopes of ruling out some models in favour of others. if a model predicts that employment always falls when minimum wages increase, but careful comparison of employment in states that pass minimum wage hikes with neighbouring states that don’t systematically find no subsequent difference in employment, we’d have to reject this model in favour of one that admits the possibility of null effects. for example, an alternative model where after a minimum wage hike firms raise prices, or maybe they contract and their former workers are then hired by larger firms who pay higher wages further from the minimum wage. we could then go further and test those predictions to decide between those models. the ability to test these theories has, perhaps surprisingly, only recently become a possibility due to the advent of data at more granular levels

the role of the empirical analysis here is to get an idea of how employment changes in the counterfactual world where the minimum wage is increased. these kinds of counterfactual predictions are provisionally useful for policy guidance (a majority of respondents in the chicago IGM survey of elite American economists now support raising the minimum wage), but their real purpose is to select among models

as someone said upthread, this is a lot harder to do at the level of a macroeconomy. so the situation there is currently a proliferation of models that give more and more contingent answers but with less empirical tests to rule any out. the problem is not a lack of answers but a multiplicity of answers with no way of deciding amongst them. those are kind of the same thing in practice

in this epistemic world, there is a bias toward the status quo. we kinda know what things look like in the world as it exists and we think we can extrapolate to slightly different worlds (with ie incrementally higher minimum wages) but we have no idea what the world would look like if we radically switched shit up. so we can’t really recommend that responsibly. in this sense, policy leads economics. as the world boldly moves forward and recklessly passes untested policies, we’ll be able to explore their effects and learn more

fin

Booming post. There is something very attractive to me about the idea of building a mathematical model of the actual economy with enough precision that you could make predictions with some degree of accuracy about variables of interest. At the same time, I am skeptical this can ever be achieved. Even when trying to predict very broad aggregates, it seems economists have not made much progress with this dream. I guess its not too surprising. I think the economy of a country must be many orders of magnitude more complex than the atmosphere, yet even with supercomputers the best we can do in weather prediction is about 1-2 weeks in advance. However, I think perhaps the best use of these models is as tools for thought. I know Krugman often extols the value of "toy models" to help clarify one's thinking. However, I'm not sure that even when clarified in such a way intuition can get us as far as we'd like. Perhaps the empiricist and statistical approach is the best we should hope for. There's a lot of value in the work of economists like Gabriel Zucman of Berkeley, who's done a lot of work to map out the web of tax shelters used by the wealthy around the world, and to come up with reasonable estimates of how much wealth is being sheltered in this way. There's lots of value in that kind of research.

1.4.2021:

Hannah Black on Art Club 2000: seems vapid.

Jenny Turner on Sybille Bedford: I couldn't get much from this or see what was interesting about the writer.

Katherine Rundell on storks: makes a change to have one of these articles not end by saying, quite properly, how endangered the animal is.

Donald Mackenzie on digital advertising: I understood and learned a little bit. The odd thing is that Mackenzie is expert in these things (from other articles), but in this one keeps saying things like 'I'd never known what a cookie was till now', as if he were more like me.

Matthew Bevis on Charles Wright: treading water, failing to make the poetry not look like a waste of space.

G. Partington on UbuWeb: I wasn't sure about this topic but I have to hand it to the reviewer, it does get the material across in a well-structured and inclusive way; and is aptly sceptical about Kenneth Goldsmith.

Joe Dunthorne on Kleist: quite impressed that this film-maker character can write this. I suppose I learned something about the mysterious Kleist character.

Harry Strawson on Rave: not my scene.

Michael Wood on French words in English: starts as only Wood can start, with happy analysis of Cole Porter - but then rather devolves into unclarity and arguments that are feinted at rather than directly explained. I think MW is right to cast doubt on the final quotation lamenting English insularity - it looks like fish-in-a-barrel piety.

Owen Bennett Jones (an interesting character?) on Robert Maxwell - interesting topic, good stuff. One thing he doesn't really get into is the fact that Maxwell was an egotistical tycoon ostensibly of the Left - or just, if you prefer, of Labour - which naturally made him seem somewhat different from Murdoch. It's indicated that Maxwell only became a Labour MP because 'the establishment' wouldn't have him. But his paradoxical role still always seemed one of the most notable things about him.

I also recall him owning Derby County and Oxford United; and Brian Clough (and ... Mark Lawrenson?) greatly distrusting him.

i liked the maxwell piece as well. v interesting and morally complicated life to say the least. i can’t remember whether peter rachman is mentioned in the article, but with the convoluted background at the centre of history and equivocal social conscience. i use conscience and social entirely separately there rather than their usual paired concept indicating a positive virtue.

Jenny Turner on Sybille Bedford: I couldn't get much from this or see what was interesting about the writer.

I read, coincidentally, A Favourite of the Gods shortly before I saw this piece. I don't get it either.

Back to LRB 18.3.2021: actually quite a dull issue.

Jonathan Parry on Conservatism: remarkably poor to be a big lead article. Incredibly banal, indulgent towards 'Conservatism', treats its ideas with historic reverence, and hardly begins to get into the facts that modern Conservative parties are a) not conservative but dangerously radical, b) corrupt. This character should spend 5 minutes scanning down, say, the ILX politics thread and noting the number of times someone notes that 'nothing matters', to remind himself that we do not live in an era of normal, principled 'conservatism'.

Clair Wills on Molly Keane: a lot better. Overlong, especially as it spends so much time on the one reissued novel, but well written and insightful.

Thomas Meaney on Singapore: again long, somewhat informative but, to me, grim.

Blake Morrison on Lawrence Osborne: I have to hand it to Morrison - he's held on as an LRB reviewer, and despite seeming a minor contributor, he seems to crop up about as regularly as Neal Ascherson does. Both of them are in fact much more frequent than Collini, let alone James Wood (who's barely ever in then LRB now).

Several other articles - on the fall of Rome, Puritans, China, et al - also look more like duties than pleasures.

an era of normal, principled 'conservatism'.

i mean this never happened but otherwise otm.

"Grim" sure but it's a pretty grim topic? I don't tend to go to the LRB for feel good writing.

Ledge: if you mean 'conservatism has always been bad and corrupt' - then I would be inclined to believe you.

In which case, the reviewer's mistake would not be to fail to point out that 'conservatism' now is vile and corrupt (which I am certain it is), but to fail to point out how corruption has been endemic to it.

But I don't really know enough about eg: 18th century conservatism to know how corrupt it was compared to other politics at the time, or now.

The fundamental problem with the review is taking 'conservatism' seriously as an *intellectual* tradition (from Burke etc) and conflating this with a contemporary (never mind past) practical politics that is not intellectual or serious or principled in any whatever, but simply vile and corrupt.

The corruption is endemic to the very principle of conservatism, stated thus: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect..."

(I don't know if this formulation is already considered cliched despite being recently coined, i find it refreshing and useful.) Re: the intellectual tradition, the author goes on: "As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny."

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-the-travesty-of-liberalism.html

Funnily enough I don't think ILB's favourite prolix analyst Perry Anderson would agree with the last statement - he has analysed conservative thinkers, on their own terms, at great length. Maybe, indeed, too much length.

FWIW I think my view would be: it is OK in theory to discuss conservative ideas as potentially valid ideas, but it is misguided to discuss actual conservative political practice today* as an enactment of such ideas, rather than as corruption. The LRB article went wrong in doing that -- and was just remarkably banal and complacent.

(*Today, but possibly, as Ledge implies, ever)

"maybe… too much length"

i mean the clue is in the author (it's why we love him so)

{maybe… too much)

18.3.2021

Michael Wood on Billie Holiday film: not his best. Odd that he likes the film so much when at least some other critics didn't.

Malcolm Gaskill (wait, this is the same bloke that wrote that dreadful article about quitting UEA!) on Puritans - disappointing. Very little on the social relation between puritanism and radicalism in the 17th century, as per Christopher Hill long ago, which seems more interesting. Meanwhile the theology is obviously cobblers.

Josephine Quinn on Alaric the Goth: well-informed on the Fall of Rome et al. The LRB has such a constant attachment to classical history; is it because the editors were steeped in it?

This issue is quite a slog.

Adam Shatz has written a really good overview of Edward Said's life and work, finished it at like 1am last night so there is some interesting bits on identity politics as it was like then.

Today, it seems like a version of it has become matter for the culture war, which has become like a lot of the noise of politics today.

Finishing with LRB 18.3.2021:

Niela Orr on THE WIZ: not a good article, but reminds me that I always liked this film and was then always surprised, even pleasantly surprised, to see people mention it - maybe I should see it again.

Laleh Khalili: on Chinese infrastructure projects outside China: I was at least surprised to learn how far back these went, to the 1950s.

Thomas Jones on KLARA AND THE SUN: probably gives away too much of the book. Disjointed review, really. In standard LRB fashion it refers to all the author's past works, meaning that there is now a whole string of LRB reviews of KI talking about everything KI has published - here even referring back to those earlier reviews. Was this really the place to talk about how great THE UNCONSOLED is?

Mouin Rabbani: direct and instructive about Middle Eastern politics.

David Trotter on gimmicks: simply incomprehensible. They should have sent it back and told him to rewrite it so that an ordinary reader could have any idea what he was on about.

Ange Mlinko on Harry Mathews: the reviewer is admirably knowledgeable about poetic terms, but doesn't convince me that this particular body of poetry is appealing.

Tim Parks on Gianni Rodari: somewhat interesting on an Italian children's author; seems deliberately to punctuate the review with tellings of the tales.

Arianne Shahvisi: mixes practical knowledge of bricks and building with a much more social and political view of the building of homes. I'm relatively gratified that it seems to confirm my view that we should have less emphasis on building new buildings and more on making better use of existing (including empty) ones.

In the end I'm afraid nothing in this particular issue was very appealing.

David Trotter on gimmicks: simply incomprehensible.

lol my thoughts exactly, I wondered if it was just me.

I've been reading the LRB for around six years now. For I think the third time ever I've bought a book based on a review. First was Outline by Rachel Cusk, 5/5, got the two sequels. Then a book on Victorian working class economy for my mum, and now The Idea of the Brain by Matthew Cob. Maybe Patricia Lockwood wouldn't have been so much on my radar without the LRB.

I open an April LRB, see Lanchester on shipping, Tooze on Krugman that people discussed above. This is going to take forever.

You don't have to read it

The Lanchester was fine

i realised that i haven't read the lrb in maybe months. since the first perry anderson was published. I kindof wanted to hate read it but never did and it has ended up casting a pall. i've thumbed it a bit and read the odd article. maybe the said article will renew my interest.

Or that Tim Parks piece on Rodari. It's very good.

As incentive for the PF to keep on keeping on, there is a quite good nice review of Roy Foster's Heaney book by Seamus Perry in the 6 May issue.

Yes, both good and nice.

I have read that book!

I managed to read Tooze on Krugman. I note that others above have already commented on this, largely from the POV of: what is economics, is it valid, can it predict? - etc. The article also made me think a bit.

Tooze writes well. He's brisk. I believe that he's progressive, intelligent, thoughtful, good. Like others, I'm glad that he is getting more and more of a platform or hearing.

But the article did make me, too, think about economic commentary. Often, I felt: I am no longer really understanding this. Perhaps it was too specialised; perhaps too much jargon; as when he introduced Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models. 'Stochastic' is a word I don't understand, so I wasn't going to do well with those models.

This would then raise a meta-question: is economic commentary in the LRB, or generally, like this? Should it be made easier for us to follow? Or are we, many readers, the problem? Is this in fact the same for other areas - for instance, why should someone with little knowledge of poetry understand the LRB's poetry articles (let alone the poems?!)?

But what Tooze especially made me feel was: among the labels (like Neo-Keynesian), what concrete policies is he talking about? I think this is the area where he, or such writers, could do more, without writing less intelligently.

I asked myself what kind of economic policies are available to a government. Like:

* raising taxes (on certain groups)
* lowering taxes (on certain groups)
* investing state funds in infrastructure, eg: building hospitals or repairing roads -- thus putting money into circulation (eg: for the construction workers), while also making concrete gains.
* hiring government staff, eg: civil servants -- thus increasing those people's spending power, thus perhaps increasing economic activity (is this 'stimulating demand'?)
* setting a minumum wage -- perhaps increasing workers' spending power, and thus spreading economic benefit, though employers may find grounds to argue against it.
* regulating banking or the stock market (but here I run back into abstraction as I'm not sure what the regulation concretely is)
* altering interest rates (but here I run into difficulty as I have never really understood interest rates or their relation to other things).

Are these the kinds of things that Tooze is talking about, when he talks about economic policy? Or is it something else?

Most of the things in that list, many of us could understand. But Tooze stays quite aloof from mentioning them much. It might help me, and some readers, if he mentioned them (or other, concrete policies), and their direct effects, more.

I also note that Tooze becomes increasingly figurative. In the last couple of pages he starts to talk casually about 'running the economy hot'. But he doesn't define that term. It's almost as if he has run out of vocabulary at the end of a long seminar and is falling back on loose talk that he knows everyone will nod and broadly say they understand. He does it again 3 paras from the end, writing that the plan is 'to dry out the labour market'. Dry out? Where does dryness come from? Is it related to being 'hot'? I suspect not directly in a chain of images, though it may be connected in his actual thought about causality.

It's normal for people to use metaphors. I don't blame Tooze for that. He wants to remain brisk. But I find, as I say, a certain shorthand turn to loose metaphors, which are not defined, when he could keep talking in concrete terms. I think that the problem with this intelligent and accomplished article is that it remains too abstract; too coolly aloof from concrete decisions and actions; too much at the level of labels.

I agree with poster James Morrison: Lanchester on shipping, despite what one says about him, was basically sound. Readable, informative, concrete. The notion of flags of convenience, ships registered in countries they have nothing to do with, struck me.

He only goes wrong at the end where he repeatedly says "We have colluded with ignoring the world of shipping", "We put it out of mind". He himself has stressed that shipping has become "invisible", so the ascription of agency to ordinary people ("us"), who have many other things to think about, for repressing it is false. (It would be more reasonable to say this about homelessness.) It's an example of how Lanchester can easily fall into lazily bad thinking and writing, despite having written a mostly useful article.

i can help fill in some blanks, pinefox

But the article did make me, too, think about economic commentary. Often, I felt: I am no longer really understanding this. Perhaps it was too specialised; perhaps too much jargon; as when he introduced Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models. 'Stochastic' is a word I don't understand, so I wasn't going to do well with those models.

dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models are mathematical models of the economy coded up as programs on the computer. once coded up, you can feed the simulated economy an unanticipated "shock" to the model (that's the stochastic part) and then it tells you how a variety of objects in the economy (GDP, unemployment, wages, interest rates, inflation--that's the general equilibrium part) will respond over time (that's the dynamic part). the output looks like a bunch of different wiggly lines:

https://forum.dynare.org/uploads/default/original/2X/8/8bbb50e96bf0fadab72e6ec8de4a9064ca501e31.png

the minimal intellectual history background that you need to know about DSGE models is that they have been out of favour since the great recession for being insufficiently realistic along various dimensions, and also having poor predictive power.

an example of an unrealistic assumption is that of a "representative household": the idea that patterns of consumption, employment and savings in the economy at large (which are formed by aggregating over millions of heterogeneous households) can be represented by one household

keynes critiqued exactly this kind of aggregation with an example he called the paradox of thrift. suppose everyone in the economy saves 10% of their income. then they reduce their consumption on goods by 10%. then all shops in the economy see 10% lower sales, and hence they cut wages by 10%. then the same households that initially saved 10% of their income now have 10% lower earnings. therefore, the total amount of savings in the economy may decrease in response to an increase in the rate of savings. this is not the way it works if an individual household decides to increase their savings

an example of a poor prediction made by DSGE models can be seen in the chart above: all the wavy lines tend to return to their initial value. this property, that an economy rebounds to its initial state after a shock (and does so relatively quickly), is in dispute after the great recession. here's a graph of greece's gdp; as you can see, no rebound

https://www.theglobalist.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/mayer-chart-5.png

* raising taxes (on certain groups)
* lowering taxes (on certain groups)
* investing state funds in infrastructure, eg: building hospitals or repairing roads -- thus putting money into circulation (eg: for the construction workers), while also making concrete gains.
* hiring government staff, eg: civil servants -- thus increasing those people's spending power, thus perhaps increasing economic activity (is this 'stimulating demand'?)
* setting a minumum wage -- perhaps increasing workers' spending power, and thus spreading economic benefit, though employers may find grounds to argue against it.
* regulating banking or the stock market (but here I run back into abstraction as I'm not sure what the regulation concretely is)
* altering interest rates (but here I run into difficulty as I have never really understood interest rates or their relation to other things).

Are these the kinds of things that Tooze is talking about, when he talks about economic policy? Or is it something else?

he is mostly talking about macroeconomic stabilization (fighting recessions) which consists of two parts

(1) fiscal policy: government sending out cheques, extending unemployment insurance, spending money on infrastructure, etc. during a recession

the basic idea here is that governments have license to spend in excess of their usual budget during a recession. this is in part because there is more need (many unemployed people, increases in poverty) and partly because some resources sit idle during a recession, so if government spending can get those resources back in use there is a potential for output to increase.

(2) monetary policy: central banks cutting interest rates, printing money, buying debt

the only thing you really need to know about interest rates is that they are a cost (specifically, the cost of borrowing and the return to saving), and all the interest rates in the economy (rates on car loans, mortgages, the rates firms face when they borrow money to make investments, etc.) move up and down with the interest rates set by central banks. in general if the central bank raises interest rates, you are raising the cost of doing things in the economy, and output contracts. if the central bank cuts interest rates, economy-wide costs decrease, and output expands.

these two different approaches, fiscal and monetary, can both be used in tandem to fight recessions.

I also note that Tooze becomes increasingly figurative. In the last couple of pages he starts to talk casually about 'running the economy hot'. But he doesn't define that term. It's almost as if he has run out of vocabulary at the end of a long seminar and is falling back on loose talk that he knows everyone will nod and broadly say they understand. He does it again 3 paras from the end, writing that the plan is 'to dry out the labour market'. Dry out? Where does dryness come from? Is it related to being 'hot'? I suspect not directly in a chain of images, though it may be connected in his actual thought about causality.

"running the economy hot" is jargon for leaving interest rates low and keeping government spending high even after the economy has recovered from a recession. the idea is that, after the recovery (say, after output and unemployment have returned to their previous trend), low interest rates could be too stimulative. they might cause an excess of borrowing and debt which may cause problems down the road.

"drying out the labour market" is a mixed metaphor, but it's related to running the economy hot. here's the basic idea. before the covid crisis started last march, the unemployment rate was around 3.5%. then it spiked to over 13%. over time, it has gradually come down and now sits at 6%. interest rates have been low and government spending high in the hopes of bringing this number down further. suppose unemployment continues to fall, such that it eventually reaches 3.5%. if the central bank continues to keep interest rates low, and the government keeps spending high, they are running the economy hot. if unemployment continues to decrease, say to 2.5%, then firms may find it hard to find workers. they may even resort to raising wages in order to fill positions. the labour market is then "dried out." the idea is not just to wait until the labour market reaches its pre-crisis normal, but to go a bit further and hold it there a while

Thanks, ILB poster Flopson, for taking the time to share your knowledge at length. It's all too rare that one finds this anywhere in life.

I'll try to read your posts properly and try to understand them.

np, happy to answer any follow ups

Meanwhile, finished at last with LRB 22.4.2021.

Rivka Galchen on the brain: credit to her, she takes on a topic like this that isn't, I think, her field, and writes knowledgeably and accessibly on it, if only on the basis of the hefty books under review.

James Romm on the invention of medicine: this turns out to be all about ancient Greeks like Hippocrates and at exactly what dates they wrote. Specialised but in a way more satisfying than vaguer conceptual stuff would be.

Irina Dumitrescu on early medieval women's writing: worthy, but expands the idea of 'collaboration' too far when it describes a present-day writing process.

Richard J. Evans on 'civilising Europe': looks like it'll be OK, but it's remarkably poor - ending up saying little about the book but little about the real topic either, and instead just giving a generalised, clichéd account of the last 70 years of world history. Ends up vapid.

Stephen W. Smith: informative on French military adventures south of the Sahara.

I ploughed through most of the others but no comment really needed.

On to the next issue and Edward Said: already fascinating on him and the whole issue looks promising.

Rivka Galchen on the brain: credit to her, she takes on a topic like this that isn't, I think, her field, and writes knowledgeably and accessibly on it, if only on the basis of the hefty books under review.

she has an MD and specialized in psychiatry, so i think it very much is her field

I learn that an MD is a postgraduate medical degree -- that's very impressive!

I only knew ms Galchen, or apparently *Dr* Galchen, from more literary essays.

LRB 6.5.2021:

I liked reading the essay on Edward W. Said. Not a big fan of Adam Shatz, but I learned from the essay how political Said was - not just a commentator or sympathiser, but deeply involved with the PLO. The review states that Said had numerous affairs but that the biography refuses to tell us who with. It also states that Said was troubled, insomniac, anxious. And what about the fact that he once killed a motorcyclist in a motoring accident in the Swiss mountains? You'd think that would stay with you. But I have never heard a word about it till now.

Why does Ferdinand Mount still appear in the LRB? He knows a lot, he can refer to the classics and other periods of history - yes. But even if you leave aside his participation in Thatcher's governments, something that many people would not choose to forgive - then his commentary is too often whimsically dilettantish in tone. His review of Peter Oborne feels like something written a few years ago, like something that's been published before. He digresses to the history of lying and to Oborne's other works, not focusing on what Oborne is actually saying now or why. And he's the kind of person who says garbage like "It's hard not to laugh along with Boris Johnson, even though, on reflection, one realises one shouldn't". Anyone who starts with that attitude to BJ shouldn't be in print.

I appreciate Peter Geoghegan's more straight-talking approach in (Short Cuts here) identifying and explaining the corruption of the UK government.

I've just abandoned Adam Phillips in the latest issue, too much freudian garbage.

As the French psychoanalyst Nicole Oury writes, ‘the destiny of the child is also weighed down by the unrepresentable place of his origins, the desire between a father and a mother.’ The child can never really know the nature of the desire through which he was conceived: he is left out of his own conception. If the male child can ‘possess’ the mother he will never be excluded from her presence, and if he can kill the father she will have no other object of desire and he will have no rival. In a more benign and in some ways more instructive reading of the Oedipus complex, Bela Grunberger proposed that the father who excludes the son from the mother’s bed is the guardian of the child’s future potency: if the son was to attempt sex with the mother he would be physically incapable and therefore humiliated.

Oh no I've been left out of my own conception *cries*, luckily I never humiliated myself by attempting sex with my mother.

Although he brings in Kafka and Hamlet I've no idea what place such an essay has in the LRB.

Phillips is someone who can apparently come up with any old nonsesnse and the LRB will publish with little or no editing. At least PAnderson writes about particular topics!

Kafka, Hamlet and Milton's Satan. I found it sketchy too, it is funny that the cover advertises it as "on fomo" tho.

I finally got enticed into restarting my sub, see if I manage to actually read the fucker this time. So far the long piece on roth ok but kind of annoying/clunkily written in places (what began as a parade float ended up a runaway garbage fire) & the one about mycelial networks is fascinating and crazy

I haven't of course reached that issue but agree with Ledge: that paragraph is full of garbage. Why print it?

the roth piece is by james wolcott who is absolutely one of my pet hates as a stylist (if they want a write who does this style well they shd hire the much funnier tom carson)