London Review of Books

Hey, guys, I'm about to renew my subscription to the LRB and I get 2 free 6-month subscriptions to give to friends. As all my friends are philistines, are any of you interested. First come, first served, I guess.

I'd definitely be interested if nobody else is but I would be obliged to send you a couple of books in return.

That's awfully kind, but I'm in Australia and it might bankrupt you!

Rats! Well if you'd like a book token or something. I was just about to take out a subscription so I'd be very happy to compensate you.

my friend gave me his gift subscrip for the second year in a row so i'm good. pretty great read

I let my subscription lapse about a year ago but I'd be up for another six months of it. Let me know and I'll send my address.

Cool. ShariVari and xyzzzz, if you want to send your names and postal addresses to me at my email (click my name below) I'll put you in for the subs.

James - email sent, let me know if you haven't got it and I'll try again.

Just got it--cheers!

I've also sent my details. Thank you so much.

No worries--I'll put in my sub today with both your details.

Subscribed a year back since it seemed a great magazine and I wanted to try to engage a bit with international literary criticism instead of only reading Danish literary reviews. Unsubscribing now since I can't make through these articles - not totally unlike when I first stumbled upon ilx, I find it very difficult to understand the position of the "sender". I recognize names of famous writers/philosophers/journalists, some of them I know well enough to get where they're coming from, but most of the writers I don't know, and I feel there's a lot of irony and implicit assumptions that are lost on me.

Maybe if I kept reading, I'd become a genius on every subject imaginable, maybe I'd have to be a genius to read it in the first place.

The subscription was very cheap, could easily afford another year, but it's hard on my literary conscience when unread magazines stack up, and when I skim a ten page article on Isis.

Uhm, so, any experience, advice?

I think you'd eventually get their position after a few years..its not about becoming an expert.

I let that subscription I gained from James lapse. I was fine with it and read almost all of the issues however I just want to read more novels + poetry. The free stuff they have on their site tends to cover a big piece on Syria/ISIS/Eurozone/ and further on or further in (LOL Labour leadership). Plus I find v little in the LRB's take on fiction as I have different tastes (although Jenny Dinski's stuff on Lessing is p/good).

I'll ocasionally buy it. Amd Funnily enough I have bought the last two issues to specifically read one piece each, altogether 20K+ words, on Dmitri Furman. LOL me.

my friend gave me free subscrips for a few years but i let it lapse as well

i know what you mean niels, i sometimes felt like it was pitched at an unreasonably high level of familiarity with the subject matter

read some great stuff in the lrb though. keeping abreast of new books was great for my reading list, too

I'm a lifer w/ it, I'd say. I usually run about 2-3 issues behind and catch up in bursts.

ime there's a 'I definitely should read this important-looking article' thing to overcome - I stall on issues when I fall into that. Skim and skip when you want - you can usually decide whether you're in or out after 2-3 columns of an article, and when you get to know its patterns and regulars it gets easier.

Cool, maybe I'll have at it again at some point - or I'll pick it up in airports when travelling, a lot of disposable quality reading material for the price.

I'd never read it till last christmas when I got a subscription, was immediately smitten with the naked political bias, the petty infighting of the letters page, and the 'reviews' where the reviewer spends the majority of the time demonstrating their superiority in the subject, barely mentioning the book in question. I'm a born dilettante so will happily read scholarly pieces on subjects I could never sustain interest in for a whole book. I don't kid myself that I'm learning anything, it's purely a transitory pleasure. Diski's stuff - on her cancer as well as on Lessing - is worth the entry price alone imo.

haha, that's a p great take, maybe I should revel more in the fun of it instead of being offended at not "getting it".

Just got round to Diski's last piece (vol 37/ no.24), she's finally revealed with a dramatic flourish the end game of her grand scheme - singlehandedly demolishing Doris Lessing's entire reputation.

Is that why non-subscribers can't read that installment? ;-)

(can you paste it somewhere?)

For a limited time only:
http://pastebin.com/EWaNJ3bL

tx!

xd

I had, and I think she had, a sense that she knew it all. She had been pals with R.D. Laing and lived some crazed years with Clancy Sigal. She had read a bunch of Pelican books on the sociology and psychology of behaviour. We all did then, they sat on bookshop shelves like a university course: Laing, David Stafford-Clark, Erving Goffman, Vance Packard, Michael Argyle, C.J. Adcock, Viktor Frankl. And more and more. They were all over the house, on tables, on the floor. She bought them, I bought them, Peter and his friends bought them. Somehow they were cheap enough for the smallest allowance. All these were read and taken in. How could you not cope with a difficult adolescent with all that under your belt?

A++

This was so good - and makes me want to read more Lessing next year. I must be attracted to people with shitty reputations.

I've only read The Grass is Singing, about which I have little to say, and Shikasta, which I found unpleasant and gave me a picture of its author (personal interpretation obv) which has correlated remarkably strongly with the one built up slowly and carefully by Diski.

i don't know much about lessing and haven't read any of her stuff, but i love when LRB gets scurrilous. one of the best and strangest stories i ever read was Andrew O'Hagan on abandoning a job ghostwriting an autobiography of Julian Assange

Weirdly that article is being made into a movie

siiick

Diski:

Sufism lasted, as far as I can tell, for the rest of Doris’s conscious life. In later years she never spoke to me about ‘the work’, as it was called. I wasn’t sure whether this was from disappointment about the teaching or from her understanding that I was a failure and therefore to be kept in the dark. She told me when Shah died of heart failure in 1996, but only for my information. No questions allowed. No weeping, no distress. After all, we were all here on borrowed time, waiting for the penny to drop. Shah set up groups and organisations and Roger, our small daughter and I often spent a Saturday or Sunday first in his house in a leafy village not too far from London and then at Langton House near Tunbridge Wells, another suburb of perfect respectability. The house was, I suppose, formerly the old landowner’s house, large and walled, with outbuildings and a huge garden. Things were various. People in groups went at weekends to manicure the gardens and on Saturday night to have a group meal and listen to Shah’s table talk, which was, if you listened properly, Doris said, his real teaching. There were public lectures, generally on historical or philosophical topics. The lecturers were academics or highly regarded journalists and writers, who, as far as I know, had nothing to do with the Sufis, or even knew that they were speaking under their aegis, but were paid to lecture by the Institute for Cultural Research, set up by Shah.

Thomas M. Disch reviewing a book by Peter Washington:

Shah managed to connect with one of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky's most devoted disciples, Captain J. G. Bennett. Now an old man and a spiritual orphan, Bennett was persuaded in the 1960s to turn over a valuable English estate at Coombe Springs, which had served for many years as a Gurdjieff-style Prieure. When the other trustees of the estate balked, Shah was adamant: there must be an outright gift or nothing at all. Bennett tried to negotiate, but the more conciliatory his behavior, the more outrageous Shah's demands became. The new teacher wanted to know how Bennett could have the nerve to negotiate with the Absolute. Once the Absolute had got his way, "Shah's first act was to eject Bennett and the old pupils from their own house, banning them from the place except by his specific permission. His second act was to sell the property to developers for £100,000 in the following year, buying a manor house at Langton Green near Tunbridge Wells in Kent with the proceeds."

Real estate -- secret key to the Universe

27 June. Shortly after the East Coast franchise has been sold off to a tie-up between Virgin and Stagecoach I am sitting at Leeds station when a notice is flashed up on the Sky screen: 'Hello Leeds. Meet Virgin trains. We've just arrived and we can't wait to get to know you.'

And take you for every penny we can.

You couldn't make it up.

It strikes me these days how much the LRB carries about the classical world. Can feel like 1-2 articles about Ancient Rome per issue.

I don't read Diski but did you notice that the short cuts piece on the Piers Gaveston Society was taken down from the website? Possibly for legal reasons. (I hated the article.)

Still there for me:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n19/nick-richardson/short-cuts

Basically written by hedonismbot, demystifying to the point of mundanity.

I'm ambivalent about Lessing but I can recommend the Golden Notebook. I also liked her short essayistic collection Prisons We Choose to Live Inside.

I don't know how many people remember, but Lessing went to Afghanistan in the 80s and wrote a book celebrating he Mujahideen. I remember seeing it on remainder tables (late 80s or early 90s) and I wish I had bought a copy. I would like to read that some day. I'd be surprised if she didn't have some contact with the CIA.

I think I was reading LRB a lot about ten years back. I appreciated their coverage of Israel's aggression against Lebanon in 2006. I do feel a bit lost at times, in LRB. It all seems terribly British, though I guess I find the flavor a little more palatable than TLS. (I like that end of the year issue of TLS though, where lots of writers talk about what they have been reading in the past year.) I still glance at it from time to time and I think I like its reviews of philosophy, history and social science works best. Often it's choice of what literature to cover bores me, but then I hardly do any literary reading, so my opinion is pretty useless on that.

(Since I haven't read her Mujahideen book I probably shouldn't be saying it was a celebration of them, but that's the impression I remember getting from glancing at it.)

i can recommend the golden notebook (incidentally my wife was less complementary, enigmatically remarking while reading it that "you might as well be reading something written by a man", whatever she meant by that) but the overall oeuvre of lessing im not so sure about. some clunkers for sure. there's a book of hers called the fifth child which is basically "we need to talk about kevin" ten years earlier and without the massacre dénouement. it's just as poor as the shriver book.

we started to read it in high school - it was part of the syllabus - but the book was so universally disliked, including by the teacher that we changed to a different book. I had already finished it by that stage, unfortunately.

Every female friend I've ever mentioned Lessing to has either had no opinion or a negative opinion. On the other hand, my mother was a Lessing enthusiast though, at least up to the science fiction phase, though I think at that point she still respected her for doing what she wanted with her work.

I had a professor in college who said that Lessing could not "write an English sentence" (if I remember the phrase correctly).

Another thing about LRB: a lot of times the article titles are as obscure to me as a goon crew or lex thread title on ILM.

"What Lord Essington Didn't Find in the Forest"

And I am left wondering if I should be interested in this or not.

When I worked in a bookshop Lessing was highly thought of by a lot of women who would have thought of themselves as 2nd-gen feminists. Not that they bought anything new by her, but they looked back fondly on her heyday.

I've liked a few of her books, and some of her stories, but she's very hit and miss for me.

(I like that end of the year issue of TLS though, where lots of writers talk about what they have been reading in the past year.)

I like that as well. TLS' coverage of translated literature is far, far better than the LRB.

As for Lessing The Golden Notebook is all-time and that piece of Diski's points to The Children of Violence series so that's where I'll go next.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/04/28/the-editors/jenny-diski/

Diski died this morning, sadly. Ominously, no pieces by her had appeared recently.

Nifty thing of 100 de-paywalled 'diary' articles from various places/events around the world: http://www.lrb.co.uk/archive/100-diaries

definitely one of those times when i regret not having a subscription to the lrb: vaneigem on bosch

word can someone pastebin that

http://pastebin.com/FBWLnhUu

may the almighty lord's blessing rain on you vigorously

^seconded :-D

thirded!

I'm looking for a magazine focusing on new fiction (preferably global, genre-inclusive) for inspiration - great as LRB and NYRB are, I'm more interested in reviews and interviews than in-depth analysis. Any recommendations?

World Literature Today and its new spinoff Latin American Literature Today might be worth a look. but I cant think of anything that exactly fits the bill, and would also read a magazine like the one you describe.

Michael Orthofer's Complete Review is a blog, not a magazine, and it doesn't have interviews, but it has many good reviews of current and older world literature. Don't let the mid-1990s Geocities look of the site turn you off, because the quality of the content is really good.

^^^ good one. Though be aware he pretty much hates short fiction, poetry, most non-fiction, and book covers that aren't pure white with a little bit of text.

thanks for the input! went with a sub to World Literature Today, but will keep the Complete Review in mind for reference

I recently had my subscription renewed as a gift and I'm busy building up a new stack of articles I'll get around to at some point. Recent highlights have been Colm Toibin on Diane Arbus, Rivka Galchen on Kafka's last (read: earliest) letters and dear, creaky old Iain Sinclair on London (what else). I've missed it.

Curiously I've found it below-par recently ... including for instance Runciman on Theresa May.

Agreed on that article. Very flat. Evidence of a torpor in the opposition?

wasn't impressed with the sinclair, his concerns might be legit but it just read like old man yells at cloud.

i find him at quite a basic level unreadable. that first set of sentences!

So: the last London. It has to be said with a climbing inflection at the end. Every statement is provisional here. Nothing is fixed or grounded. Come back tomorrow and the British Museum will be an ice rink, a boutique hotel, a fashion hub. The familiar streets outside will have vanished into walls of curved glass and progressive holes in the ground. The darkened showroom of the Brick Lane monumental mason with the Jewish headstones will be an art gallery. So?

I saw Sinclair give that lecture in person. He was mostly just improvising with eloquence. It's odd that it has now become a piece of ... writing.

I can imagine it being transcribed by a computer from the recording. Which would helpfully explain Fizzles' bemusement.

I used to love his prose, thought it sparked off the page. That certainly doesn't. Also that bit about the BM, I know it's lol hyperbole but my first thought was "no it won't".

I think it's been diminishing returns for a while with Sinclair - almost like he's written himself to a standstill inside ever-decreasing circles.

it's a bit like he's writing the voice-over for a documentary. which would be fine, if the documentary existed, and there were images to hang the scraps from.

i get both lrb and nyrb but i think i am going to jettison the first. so much of it feels sealed off in its own world.

friend of mine who had to work w iain sinclair told a story about him where he came off as a pompous, defensive, bitter misogynist which has put me off getting more familiar

I have always found his writing rather hard to follow. Is this worse than his previous writing? I mean both worse for that trait and worse in general.

The bit about the British Museum is obviously a joke and, yes, perhaps it does all seem like 'old man yells at cloud' but I do know exactly what he means. I took a walk through the West End recently and was astonished at the amount of demolition and construction going on. A great many familiar (or kind of familiar) buildings are disappearing. On one corner of Leicester Square, something large has gone (a cinema, I think). I believe they are going to extend the hotel next door (the former Leicester Square Dental Hospital). Then, in Soho, Walker's Court is in the process of being torn apart. The Raymond Revue Bar building was being demolished even as I walked past. And it was the same on a number of other blocks around there. (Also, I recently noticed that the Odeon Marble Arch has gone.) Perhaps it is just age. It's only because these things have been around in my lifetime that it seems strange to see them go. If I was young and had only recently come to London, probably none of it would be particularly remarkable.

I think he has been a very very good writer, in his own way. Maybe one of the greats of his generation.

Maybe he is past his prime but that will come to all of us. If we're lucky. Enough to have a prime.

But it's true, this particular London lecture, in person, was not great work. Rambling, semi-reactionary, etc, and only occasionally insightful. He oddly connected London to Donald Trump; can't recall if there was any substance to that.

Liked Downriver quite a bit at the time and have much time for his film crit. Sinclair's BFI book on Crash is good.

His LRB work though is rough-going to say the least.

As to the LRB itself that "Women in Power" issue had a risible cover and concept. That aside it was pretty good. Loved the pieces on Spinoza, Claretta Mussolini, Kafka and they actually got me interested in a work of fiction (The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus) which happens once every 3/6 months. LRBs coverage of fiction is so bad.

I wanted to pick up the latest issue to read Sheila Fitzpatrick's essay on the centenary of the Russian Revolution/review of recent books on it but haven't yet.

I also let my sub lapse and have been tempted to renew again, but have been waiting for an issue with enough to really win me back. So far, no luck.

I know it's not really the thread for it, but any thoughts on who may take over the reins of the NYRB?

to read Sheila Fitzpatrick's essay on the centenary of the Russian Revolution/

iirc SPs conclusions that there isn't much enthusiasm for the Russian revolution or its ideas was kinda...off to me, especially given what has been happening post-Latin America, then onto Sanders/Corbyn and some of the fierce counters from the right (and er Bannon being a fan of Lenin, although that's probably a troll, even so..)

Iain Sinclair is a pain in the hole. Only stuff of his I have enjoyed were the book-scout bits in White Chapel Scarlet Tracings or whatever it was. Psychogeography has produced a vast amount of bad writing, probably second only to the Beats.

simplicius simplicissimus is very good!

I really like Iain Sinclair but I think his window, by design, due to the nature of his obsessions, was relatively narrow - from Lights Out to Edge of the Orison (the fiction is a different beast). I think I'm also fine with thinking him a bit of a charlatan.

That's a good statement Chinaski!

re: fiction: my sense is that he isn't really cut out for it. He is good at writing 'fact that becomes fictional', but bad when he does 'fiction based on fact'.

Opened the new issue, ie with Sinclair. Seems surprisingly uninteresting.

i have done a 180 on the lrb. the last few issues have been excellent. so many highlights! michael wood on fritz lang. peter green on ancient greece.

nyrb on the other hand. does anybody actually read those tomasky articles on trump? maybe it's the change in editorship, but the quality feels wildly variable all of a sudden.

I saw Wood give that lecture at the British Museum. It felt like very below-par Wood, worryingly wayward by his standards. But I think it comes across a bit better in print. The same was true of Sinclair's 'Last London'.

it could have been better. he never really ties together the big heat and mabuse the way he says he wants to. but it was fascinating to me all the same.

The long article on the Cadbury's Somerville plant was excellent - both incredibly sad and worrying but with these occasional flashes of unintentional comedy. "We watched the last Crunchie come off the production line" or whatever.

I didn't get much out of that piece on Lang. Like Wood synthesized a lot of readings to...I'm not sure what point. Did remind me that I must read someting by Kraucauer.

I loved Jenny Turner's piece on Elsa Morante - great literary journalism on a writer whose work I love.

krakauer generally a let-down in my experience -- tho i do remember liking his piece on the tiller girls

i think LRB has had some terrific stuff this year, I was going to do a giant post on all the good stuff (and then remembered i have an actual large writing project which is already three months past deadline)

The long article on the Cadbury's Somerville plant was excellent - both incredibly sad and worrying but with these occasional flashes of unintentional comedy. "We watched the last Crunchie come off the production line" or whatever.

― Matt DC, Saturday, 29 April 2017 09:02 (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

James Meeks is the lrb writer I will always make sure to read. The long article about social housing from about three years ago was his best I think.

krakauer generally a let-down in my experience -- tho i do remember liking his piece on the tiller girls

Thought you liked him - maybe I'm mis-remembering you talking him up a couple of years ago (?)

They're doing the free subscription thing again, so the first person who wants one can have one: just let me know. it says you can't have been a subscriber before to qualify.

Haven't finished yet, but this is quite powerful so far.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n18/tom-crewe/here-was-a-plague

I don't know that we need another trawl through the horror of Plath's life, but there's no doubting this was luridly compelling:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n24/joanna-biggs/im-an-intelligence

I was reading that yesterday - and I would've avoided it because I know of the new details this is providing (namely Ted's physical assault, and Sylvia's discovery of letters to Assia and her reaction - think this one is new), but then again I wanted to see how this read after I engaged with Plath's work this year (went on a run of Letters Home, Bell Jar and of course the Complete Poems). Also the writer did input details of her own life in it, which (post-Janet Malcolm) every commentator of Plath should do now. A law should be passed.

I found the autobiographical elements (almost intentionally?) clumsy - an unnecessary, first-draft, framework that could easily have been removed. Malcolm's is still the definitive account for me.

Awful article!

James Wolcott on Saul Bellow

:( :( >:( >:(

(i haven't read it yet)

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n02/james-wolcott/the-unstoppable-upward

tag yrselves, i'm sister jane

(the bit where bellow hard-slaps a girlfriend at a meal lots of ppl are at? i want to do this to wolcott for his adjectives)

single good line is alfred kazin's, lol at the trio of ghastly literary fail/fakesons bellow accrued: james fkn wood, leon fkn wieseltier, martin fkn amis

We're all sister Jane.

Loved the Nobel dinner!

i think it's the basis of the film festen :0

I never got around to seeing this film about a wife who is married to a recipient of the Nobel in lit. Has some echoes though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wife_(2017_film)

reading the bellow article now - didn’t realise it was for the second volume of the zachary leader biog. his biog of k amis was monumentally tedious and long-winded and it sounds like james wolcott suffered similarly here.

feels like he aims for academic exhaustiveness which does not aid or prioritise insight (his amis insight was at best leaden at worst just tone deaf and rong). but it’s not clear which market he’s going for - the bookshop window or the academic $$$, either in price or style.

the perfect opposite example of this being chesterton’s wonderful short biog of browning. not much use as an academic aid to triangulating the exact social, career and geographical grid reference of the subject at any given time tho i guess.

oh god it’s all coming back reading this. his use of biographical detail to explain fictional context, not in itself an unreasonable thing to do, is incredibly hamfisted. almost denudes the notion of imaginative fiction of any worth whatsoever.

since almost any brief acquaintance with bellow and those round him makes you think "these are bad ppl and they shd feel bad", this seems a v unhelpful approach

disclaimer: i have read no bellow and judge him entirely thru the lens of the self-promotional stanning of martin amis

wow, he went to agent andrew wylie (“the jackal”), jilting his former female agent. this is interesting ofc because Mamis did the same thing to Pat Kavanagh triggering that split with her husband Julian Barnes. what a tedious shitshow.

as wolcott says “what was it with this guys?”

since almost any brief acquaintance with bellow and those round him makes you think "these are bad ppl and they shd feel bad", this seems a v unhelpful approach

disclaimer: i have read no bellow

^
This is entertaining.

I think I have to agree with it.

(I have read one Bellow - DANGLING MAN)

g00blar to thread?

I have read a lot of Bellow, but he was still a colossal shit

To be fair I don't think anyone who's read Bellow's books could be surprised to learn he was a bit of a jerk in real life. It's not like his book persona is that different. The Wolcott piece was entertaining, and it did a nice job of skimming some juicy bits from a super-long bio which I'm sure I'll never read but I do think he overrates Ravelstein quite a bit. By the logic of the piece, it had to be some kind of masterpiece to prove the doubters wrong, but I don't think it would convince anyone who wasn't already predisposed to like late-period Bellow.

These biographies never leave much space for making a case for the fiction (why are we reading this biog in the first place?) I guess you wouldn't get to it unless you liked a lot of the fiction already but for someone reading a long form review like that all you get is some entertainment over gossip -- and reading something for a laugh is as fine a reason as any. Just noting on the gap between that and the imagined importance of it beyond well er, this guy wrote some nice sentences and some people in Sweden gave him a prize for it. Oh, and he sold a lot of books once.

Of course the review might have cut that stuff out but it doesn't look like it.

they should just cut all of wolcott's adjectives out, it wd improve his writing by a million percent

also they shd put drawing pin on his chair

Yeah, I've read a fair share of his stuff and am tempted to say "I'm shocked, shocked to find out that people are saying bad things about him." In fact there was an interesting takedown I came across whilst perusing James Atlas bio a year or so ago, let me see if I can find it.

Ah, yes, here it is: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/another-rare-visit-with-noah-danzig/

Here's some background on that:

14. Last fanciful plot point was perhaps Bellow's dig at Kramer's well known homophobia.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 8, 2014

Aargh, I wanted to link to the whole thread, not that particular post but anyway

1. A Twitter Essay on Saul Bellow, Hilton Kramer, Joseph Epstein & the Perils of the Roman à clef (for @BrentNYT & @matthunte)

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 8, 2014

He managed to convince himself and others that he was a diffident, reclusive artist even as he sat for journalists and television commentators; nearly every interview with Bellow—and there were many over the years—began by claiming that he granted few interviews. Many years later, in a malicious story entitled “Another Rare Visit with Noah Danzig,” Joseph Epstein described a long interview with a fictionalized Bellow, noting that “over the years there would be no fewer than 235 such ‘rare visits’ in print.” Epstein scarcely exaggerated. Bellow ignored most letters requesting interviews, claiming not to have received them, but he was gregarious and loved to discourse on his favorite subjects to just about anyone who would listen. In the sixties, he gave sixteen interviews; in the seventies, he gave even more.

That Epstein piece is hilarious. I don't know if it captures Bellow exactly or not, but it definitely captures someone.

I read this Bellow article. I suppose it zips along but I don't like it or trust it much.

He is right, though, to point to the bizarreness and wrongness of Bellow as 'literary father'. Though did Wood really buy into that (as Amis did), or was he more simply someone who admired Bellow's writing? Which would be OK as far as it goes.

I think I agree with xyz about the ultimate triviality of it.

But this is a relatively enjoyable issue of the LRB.

Would love to read this relatively enjoyable issue of the LRB but I subscribed three weeks ago and have received nothing but a barrage of emails telling me what's in the issues they haven't sent me and how great the LRB is.

tom ime if you get in touch with their subs dep you will immediately receive three copies of every issue you’ve missed. if that helps.

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?, Katrina Marçal. In the mood for a good whodunnit.

argh wrong thread

tbh i have rock scribewars* beef against wolcott and i think his writing is annoying and terrible

*©TEwing on this very site once upon a time very long ago

(or apparently on some other site)

so: I haven't embarked on the perrython beyond the first sentence (critique so far: "teratology" is phoning it in frankly) but the petrarch piece is terrific, if only for joining the dots between ciecero, chaucer, anne boleyn, the marquis de sade and 70s film-maker luschino visconti (or ancestor of same, with identical name, in which the aristocratical clue is)

not sure i'd given petrarch a single thought since the very mild nerdly abreaction against a gag in the young ones where rick invokes abt "petrarchian sonnets" (s/b "petrarchan", come on elton). the actual most fun paragraph in this absorbing and useful piece is:

Petrarch’s Italian love lyrics, and what Celenza calls the ‘dreamy, haunted persona’ he adopts in them, had a huge influence on English poetry. This is somewhat ironic, as he doesn’t seem to have thought very highly of the English. A passing reference to ‘British barbarians’ (barbari Britanni) suggests he associated them with the Germanic vandals who sacked Rome. Even worse, they are ‘timid barbarians’ — a reference to the slavish scholastic admiration of Aristotle in Oxford and Cambridge.

i mean luchino (i checked this and then failed to change it, come on elton)

also cicero not ciecero lol

Its really good and yes loved the connections. I scored a paperback of a collection of Petrarch in English a few weeks ago which covers much the same ground as in the latter half of that piece.

Cancelling my subscription. Joined on the 10th January and have received nothing so far, took them 4 days to reply to an email I sent them asking why I hadn't received any issues yet. I'll read this thread instead.

So they've been sending my issues to the wrong address - they've got one digit of my postcode wrong. It's possible that I got it wrong when I filled out the online form - except confusing a 1 for a 7 on a keyboard is unlikely, especially if you've typed it hundreds of times. More likely is that someone has physically written the postcode and mistaken a 7 for a 1 - what century are we in again, LRB? Anyway, they've cancelled it.

... now I come to think of it, they already had my address as I had a yearlong subscription a couple of years ago! Clowns.

this feels characteristic still. i assume its still haemorrhaging cash. in its funding as well as its subs dept it feels a bit like a (very welcome) artefact from a past age and you do wonder what will happen when mk wilmers goes.

What is your evidence that it is losing money?

If you don't think it is efficient under the current editor, then I don't see why you should think that it would be more imperilled under another editor. Wouldn't it, logically, be more efficient and more viable?

Either way, as I have said on this board before -- I have never seen any evidence of what its finances are. The only thing I have ever heard, anecdotally, is that its subscribers have increased; and clearly its empire has grown with BM lectures, films, etc.

mk wilmers is the money behind it as well as the editor - hence the concern that when she goes her personal interest and financial backing of it won't be passed on to anyone.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/09/london-review-books-lrb-best-magazines-world-mary-kay-wilmers

For all its success, the London Review of Books struggles to make money. It owes its continued existence to the generosity of Wilmers herself, who regularly siphons in cash from a family trust fund.

I'd like to support them but they make it difficult by bombarding you w/ emails, needily begging for yr attention, then fucking it up when you give in and subscribe. I don't know why they have a 24-48 hour policy for replying to emails, though it's 48+ hours in practice, what is their subscription department doing all day? TBF the subscription department is probably somebody with a grand sounding title, who works two days a week, and somebody's teenage son or daughter on an unpaid internship.

serried ranks of subs richly paid to sit around all day in no way altering copy by j. lanchester, a. o'hagan etc

i did once apply but was headed off by whoever responded saying p much saying "it's an intern thing really, you're way overqualified" -- which is a pity bcz i'd have enjoyed innocently cutting all the perrywords

What is your evidence that it is losing money?

I thought I linked this last time we discussed the LRB's finances, but the evidence is the accounts:

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/01485413/filing-history

See notes 2, 8, and 11 in "accounts for a small company made up to 31 March 2018". It isn't a going concern without the interest-free loan from "a company under the control of LRB's parent undertaking". And that went up from £4,627,377 last year to £6,851,563 this year.

I am not an accountant - could be misunderstanding that. But it seems pretty clear.

I doubt that I have competence to understand that page, but I agree, it looks like substantial evidence (of whatever the case may be). I had never seen it or heard of it before.

I literally did not know that such public information about companies existed online, though I had an idea that one could go and request it somewhere.

read the perry anderson bolsonaro/brazilian politics piece. very useful for me, who knows nothing about brazilian politics, which of course also makes it difficult for me to comment on its analysis. for me it was at its strongest - sitting up and saying 'this is the stuff' - on the classification of bolsonaro, where he attacks a lazy identification with fascism, and the subsequent analysis of the political structures of the left, and their future, *somewhat* optimistic, with a body slam of a conclusion:

One must hope these judgments hold good. But memories can fade, and elsewhere, social exclusion has proved only too cruelly viable. The left has always been inclined to make predictions of its preferences. It would be an error to count on defeat self-correcting itself with time.

I'm afraid I almost diametrically disagree.

The attack on Bolsonaro's critics / classifiers is typical of PA as I described above: yes, some analytical value, but he's keener to score points against 'bien pensants' than to recognize actual dangers and admit that certain things may be very bad. We may be able to prove that Bolsonaro isn't a 'fascist' - fine. When we've done that, maybe we should recognize the great fear expressed by thousands of Brazilians and take it more seriously, whatever the label may be.

As for those last lines, they amount to saying: 'Some people may say things will get better, but they could be wrong'. It is very easy for anyone to say this about anything, and often be proved correct. It's like me saying Tottenham won't win the Champions' League. Probably accurate, but it doesn't demonstrate or require much perspicacity.

And the statement that 'The left has always been inclined to make predictions of its preferences' is simply false. Any instance of someone on 'the left' being pessimistic about the outcome of an election disproves it. And most of us can think of hundreds of instances of that.

i think the point you make about the latter statement is fair, or at least it needs more exploration than it can give itself as a concluding sentence.

for context

Fascism was a reaction to the danger of social revolution in a time of economic dislocation or depression. It commanded dedicated cadres, organised mass movements and possessed an articulated ideology. Brazil had its version in the 1930s, the green-shirt Integralistas, who at their height numbered over a million members, with an articulate leader, Plínio Salgado, an extensive press, publishing programme and set of cultural organisations, and who came close to seizing power in 1938, after the failure of a communist insurrection in 1935. Nothing remotely comparable either in terms of a danger to the established order from the left, or of a disciplined mass force on the right, exists in Brazil today.

on the fascism, i appreciate Anderson's desire to categorise and define the word and the political state in Brazil. The word fascism is used a lot at the moment, which is understandable, but the lines of force it implies seem to me to centre very much round the second world war, where the US and UK were fighting definitive 'baddies'. It's an easy bucket, somewhat forgivable. Its asking the word to do too much today, and asks too little of us to define and fight on their own terms, not because they are fascism, the racism, homophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and generalised ravenous capitalism assault on the lower-income classes that we see in the US and many European countries at the moment. I guess a shortcut to what i am saying is that fighting 'fascism' allows a sort of centrist position - the liberal response, but that a proper analysis of this assault upon progressive society produces a more rigorous form of leftism.

Not to categorise correctly now, runs the risk of not configuring the response effectively. Your method ends up producing strategy and tactics designed to fight the fascism of the past, rather than the poison of today, its paraphernalia and methods. Specific to Brazil, Anderson is saying I think Bolsonaro represents more of a continuity with military rule, its preferences and brutalities) than it does the fascist organisations of Brazil's past.

It's also part of Anderson/Singer's contention that Lula did not do enough to enable the poor to become class-conscious via education and empowerment, so that the PT maintained a 'populist opposition between rich and poor' which Bolsonaro was able to exploit, due to that lack of class-consciousness.

This seems to me a structured way to apporach the problem, which as I say, I appreciate, not least because it enables that structure to be examined and discussed or argued over.

(i am on my second pass thru this piece and have not made my mind up except to say this: i find the acronyms of brazilian political parties unreasonably muddling -- as every single one of them begins with P, why not drop the P?)

Fizzles: I agree that if Bolsonaro is not 'fascist' then he shouldn't be called that. I agree that it possible that categorizing things correctly is politically useful (or just the correct thing to do anyway). I also agree that fascist is largely a word with 1920s-1940s connotations and applying it to particular cases now, much later, is often questionable.

So what do I disagree about?

I think it's that I find it irritating that PA is more interested in scoring points against (I must reuse his phrase yet again) 'bien pensants' than he is in saying what is bad about what is, as I understand it, a radical right political movement in Brazil.

This is all part of PA's contrarianism. He probably prefers Nigel Farage to Gordon Brown.

When Bolsonaro was elected, a lot of people (for instance, gay people in Brazil) expressed a lot of fear. Some, I think, fled the country. I don't know enough about the reality to say if the fears have proved justified yet. But I would rather give these seemingly real dangers credence, than spend time scoring points against well-meaning liberals who may not have used quite the right word to describe them.

The one thing that PA allows is that native people in the Amazon, as I recall, are under threat. It's good that he points that out. Maybe he should also admit that other people and things may also be under threat.

It is strange for such a political thinker to be so uninterested in the actual real-life perils and disasters that politics often brings. PA's President is Donald Trump, but he doesn't seem bothered about it.

right, yes. one of the things i was uncertain about, when i posted above, was whether it really mattered whether 'crypto-military rule' plus homophobia wasn't the dictionary definition of fascism or not. you don't want to be the sort of person who goes well actually the fasces is a bunch of sticks and strictly refers to the italian variety what i think you mean is nazism a very different animal let me tell you &c.

you want to say 'well what does it matter?' in such circumstances. i come down on PA's side, because he identifies where it does matter – the slowness of the Brazilian left to comprehend social media for instance, and the aforementioned difficulty in translating popular support of the poor into class consciousness, enabling an educated, self-aware bulwark against Bolsonaro.*

also what you characterise as a complacency, i see more as an attempt at a dispassionate analysis of his character. PA identifies the homophobia, and warns that no one should expect him to be less brutal, for all the brittleness of his personality and circumstance, albeit in different paragraphs. the implication seemed to me to be reasonably clear and worrying. just that it would be specific to identifiable groups, rather than 'wholesale' oppression. i'm not sure he needs to add 'this is of course no less unwelcome', and i don't get the impression from his tone that he thinks otherwise.

However...

*I originally wrote 'self-aware bulwark against Bolsonaro's...' what? not populism, which PA seems slightly weak on, identifying it with its symptomatic expressions in many countries: immigration & sovereignty. my preferred emphasis and definition is here: politicisation of the state, rejection of constraint. sovereignty is an expression of that, but doesn't need to be the only one. military rule, and Bolsonaro's clear statements in his political career about that being a preferred option for government, mean i think the question of populism deserves more exploration.

the point remains - PA has defined Bolsonaro's success as being almost entirely a function of the collapse in legitimacy of the other parties. his absence from the hustings other than on twitter is seen as a part of his success. further, PA constantly describes the looseness of Bolsonaro's constituency, the brittleness of his position. If the essay has a failing for me, it's in its suggestion that Bolsonaro is only a collection of negative qualities, and not an assertion of something new and something dangerous in politics. (He's clearly dangerous in his position as President). PA's real subject is the failure of the left, and in an essay on Bolsonaro that would definitely be a charge of complacency.

I wouldn't call it complacent, rather something else -- I think as a contrarian he cultivates a cool toughness, which combines with his natural Olympian stance. He wants to imply that eg: only pathetic bien-pensants would worry about Donald Trump, whereas PA is way beyond such things.

rereading again, with PF's and F's comments in mind, i am *still* hitting speed bumps every time PA mentions either the PSDB or the PMDB -- the acronyms only differ by one letter and PA never spells which either acroynm stands for (see below) (and actually even their politics he seriously skims over in favour of structural shorthand: "centre right, fig-leaf asocial democratic" vs "centre, sprawling network of clientelism"

the latter is the one the PT (lula's party, the worke'rs party) went into coalitions with = basically the root of most of the corruption scandals that began blowing up all over the place abt five years ago…

anyway i shouldn't be having to write out a list to check back against each time: this is more "star writers don't need subbing" nonsense from MKW i fear :(

PSDB = Brazilian Social Democracy Party (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira)
PMDB = Brazilian Democratic Movement (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro)

I like this post.

I did not notice that PA actually wrote 'asocial democratic'.

haha no he didn't that is my bad typing -- but he did put 'social democratic' in scare quotes

I've yet to read the article and don't want to pass myself off as an expert on Brazil, but what I *can* say is that the military dictatorship that Bolsonaro is in clearer continuity with was on very good terms with Salazar back in Portugal (who I don't think you can make an argument for as anything but a fascist), and that ppl on the Brazilian and Portuguese left definitley saw the fight against their dictatorships as a common struggle back then. So fascism-adjacent at the very least.

OK so here goes:

One of things that pulled me up short rereading this was his cliffhanger sentence at the end of the Lula/Dilma section: “Yet this muted interim had, all the same, cleared the way for a high-pitched obbligato to come.” By which he means that the PT’s normal opponents (in particular the PDMB) had tumbled into same the morass of corruption and anti-corruption at the PT, and completely collapsed politically — but look, something nasty is coming down the pike!

Except “obbligato” doesn’t mean something nasty, even when it’s high-pitched: it means and I quote (the internet) “an instrumental part, typically distinctive in effect, which is integral to a piece of music and should not be omitted in performance”. So either PA is wildly misusing an unusual word, which can surely never be the case — or what exactly is he saying here?

I think he’s rather obscurely admitting that actually he doesn’t really want to write about Bolsonaro, who he doesn’t find especially interesting — but he realises he has to. The entire essay is named for JB, as is is second part — and yet it’s mainly not directly about him. It’s about Lula and the PT, and how and why its project failed. Which he goes into in a detail that suggests a tremendous sad affection: this was something PA wished had worked out, and he wants — earnestly, urgently — to set out why it didn’t.

Here’s some of what he’s juggling: the personalities, the manoeuvre of parties, the shifting nature of the legal context, the ideological make-up of the courts, the complex transformations (and non-transformations) of the layering of class, in a HUGE and very diverse country, the apparent deliquescence of the social background into insecurity and violence (tho I need to say more on this), and (if only gestured at) the sense that this should not be just shuffled into the general (“bien pensant”) sense that “populism is back and it’s very bad”. He also includes a very favourable drive-by review of André Singer’s examination of the same material, which I assume is his main source for this essay — while not omitting some interesting and pertinent criticism of same, in particular about the valency (as opposed to the morality) of the PT’s enwebment in corruption and how its drive against same took them down hardest. (I enjoy the ambivalence of PA’s anti-moralism here without at all knowing who’s correct: also useful to have the old meaning of the word ‘republicanism’ restated, with its problematics at least hinted at… )

(There’s an argument I sometimes see made that the extreme reaction in the UK in the 90s against “sleaze” has had many more bad effects than good

And I have to say that I think his organisation of this extremely complex multifold material is — if only for clarity, given its complexity — superb. It’s a triumph of his particular brand of structural marxism: setting out the byzantine social forces in full effect, and at the very least indicating the cultural vectors that help establish the hegemonic terrain. Is it an accurate portrait? Don’t ask me — I am seriously embarrassed by how little I know about Brazil (I got briefly excited when Caetano Veloso were mentioned in passing).

So anyway, this is the upside: a serious and deep exploration of why Lula fell and the mountain -range the PT now have to climb. It is NOT — despite title — much of an examination of Bolsonaro, except to faff around comparing him to and distinguishing him from Trump. And I think there’s a reason for this, which is hidden in and perhaps obscured by his flipping off the “left”, for (as he seems to see it) their chaotic unhelpful panic in the present moment, and concomitant bad analysis and English-speaking parochialism.

Basically — I guess it’s the entire root of his structuralism — he thinks the flamboyant and contradictory personalities in each case are a distraction for the social forces that have adopted these figureheads and are moving fast behind the scenes to reconfigure the battleground behind the noise and the absurdism (often in ways unrelated to the loud declarations of intent from the personalities). Don’t look at this, look at that! And a distraction, also, from the broader collapse of the centre left project of the 90s and 00s, which I think he is just by now bored of reiterating: this entire teratological efflorescence as an unavoidable outgrowth of the catastrophe of the Third Way etc etc, which correct or not as analysis is old ground for us all. The elaboration of how Lulaism — which for a time stood apart — fell foul of this collapse is I think primarily what he thinks it important to set out here (and indeed primarily what engages his enormous brain).

Part of this old-ground analysis has consistently been that what seems awful right now and incoming in fact merely continues what’s been becoming awful since c.2008, and plus a masked but desedimenting awfulness from well before that. The social rot that the Third Way failed to turn around; plus its very naive belief that — now at least arm in arm with the forces of capitalism — it could continue to direct policy where it chose in times of downturn.

He never steps back to say any of this: it’s implicit, possibly because he so strongly feels that contextualisation in respect of the US (let alone the UK) is always a move back towards cultural and political parochialism. And that the merely parochial hoohah directed at Trump or Brexit — especially from the centre left so-called — is actually strangely easily recuperable, by these deeper masked forces. At least until these force are better unmasked, and a politics of their demolition is more widely in place.

Of course from its olympian perspective — “just the structure, ma’am” — the NLR has never been good at the practical outlay of this politics of demolition, how and where to start it, what to do (except sometimes to scoff at its woollier manifestations: recalling a briefly snippy exchange between Anderson and Alex Cockburn re the anti-war marches of 2003, which PA had rather sneered at and Cockburn, always better at this kind of stuff, cogently defended). There’s a slightly self-parodic moment where PA seems to be arguing that the PT’s doom was sealed when they failed to pay attention to the intellectual layer (“the party essentially ignored them, in a myopic philistinism for which all that mattered were electoral calculations”). A serious question here might be, How could these intellectuals better have presented themselves and their critique, to ensure that self-critical analysis was seen as something that mattered? But it’s a question that the NLR would also struggle to answer with any vigour, I feel.

And that’s really what’s missing. PF laments the absence of greater response to e.g. Trumpism or the actual immediate effects (already realised, soon possible) of Bolsonaro in the driving seat. Anderson is arguing that we should actually be responding to something beyond this — but yes, he never says how and so it all ends up strangely apolitical.

(Note on PA’s treatment of the “apparent deliquescence of the social background into insecurity and violence” — left till later lol. This will surely do for now.)

PART ONE^^^ :^D

(part two if ever attempted will be a critique of PA's approach to "cultural vectors")

btw PA has written about Lula in the past

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n07/perry-anderson/lulas-brazil

So this latest dispatch being more concerned with Lula's project rather than Bolsanaro feels right.

xp, brilliant Mark, looking froward to pt 2!

skimming that earlier piece -- i will read it properly later -- PA could profitably have titled this new one "LULA: how very wrong i was, eh"

ty neil, tho FP'd obviously for putting pressure on me to write something i've actually said i might

I believe in you!

i certainly hope you do. that was a very stimulating summary, which I'm still digesting a bit.

realised while pootling round in the bus earlier that PF's position re PA on bolsonaro is exactly ep thompon's on PA re older monsters

another funny PA story: when he published a series of critical essays in the LRB in the early 70s [edit: mistyped this, s/b 80s] on key conservative thinkers -- oakeshott, hayek i think, forget the others -- e.p.thompson sent him a note saying "these are rascals! please stiffen your tone"

― mark s, Friday, September 9, 2011 2:43 PM (seven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

.
.
.

just looked it up -- it's from pel's obit for thompson, in 93:

"‘What’s Perry up to these days?’ he enquired. Tariq mentioned something I’d written on conservatism in this paper. ‘Yes, I know,’ Edward replied. ‘Oakeshott was a scoundrel. Tell him to stiffen his tone.’"

― a hurrrr hurrrr (history mayne), Friday, September 9, 2011 2:47 PM (seven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Finished reading this piece both yesterday and now. There happens to be an interesting letter about it on the LRB which provides further analysis on the role of television and the evangelical movement and seems to almost be addressing Mark's point on the lack of interest in Bolsanaro by filling in more gaps.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n03/perry-anderson/bolsonaros-brazil

(bottom of the page)

As for the piece I am not sure how good its analysis is at times. Too much is perhaps made of Bolsanaro's shooting for one, and it only mentions in passing the polls showing that Lula was apparently favourite to win the election against Bolsanaro were he allowed to contest. So much for all the obstacles facing the PT -- the economy, corruption, etc. -- but it actually took the judiciary (via threats from the military) to deliver the victory for Bolsanaro. Feels like he just runs around this?

(Incidentally Lula's project seems similar to the one in Venezuela at times -- a similar level of social programs combined with a lack of class warfare -- although there is a lot more mobilisation in Venezuela. I think he is good on the shortcomings of these pacts, which is the core of the piece)

i i would honestly like to see a perry-length LRB piece (not by him!) on these parallel evolutions of TV in italy, brazil and of course the murdoch network in the US (and inc. the effects of his newspapers on TV in the UK, esp.the degradation of political coverage on the BBC) -- the letter is useful (and witty) but it still feels to me that lots is going unexplored

(of course if it's not by perry we probably won't spend all our free time picking it to bits on this thread so swings and roundabouts for the proposed mystery writer of this piece)

The only English language writer I can think of who looked like he was interested in lots of foreign TV is Clive James :-(

ok yes i don't want him to write it either

I'm sure he can find time in between rewriting Dante and Proust and giving interviews about the surprising mystery of still being alive!

if CJ also rewrites powell then maybe we can distract perry for as long as it takes for mysteryman to get a-scribblin

Surely an LRB article on the significance of changes in UK TV would only be written by ... Lanchester.

TBF I would read that, as long as it wasn't fiction

i keep thinking about the only paragraph i’ve read of The Wall and how bad it was and wondering how he achieves such consistency.

I’ve grown a bit weary of the lrb house style*, esp Lanchester, even Meek’s one on media recently i thought was weak, so was pleased to see the recent Patricia Lockwood piece on twitter and was thinking how much more i’d enjoy the current house style if they had more pieces clearly not in it.

*that feeling that everything is set out and you nod along with it and... then nothing. (mark you summed part of this up well somewhere possibly itt, but i can’t quite remember how you put it.) it all feels a bit pre the legitimacy crisis of the cultural/political world. one style option is for things need to go in a bit harder - i’ve got empson’s voice in my head. there need to be suggested options, modelled outcomes. a willingness to get things measurably wrong rather than the ineluctable structural rightness many pieces aim for. another style i like is practiced by maggie nelson or kate briggs, rivka galchen too (tho not so much in the lrb) - the avoidance of that sort of structural ex cathedra dogmatism, with the creation of looser non dogmatic conversational spaces within the text. briggs associates this with barthes late lectures and i find it immensely refreshing whenever i read it. wry, personal, associational. at the moment it’s lockwood who practices a version of this best.

maybe where i was talking abt why i am unimpressed by lanchester the reporter (it's on the ferrante thread lol): Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels)?

i got into a mild beef w/flopson there bcz i said JL knows "nothing" abt economics meaning "nothing i didn't already know -- he never NEVER digs into anything i find unexpected", which i guess is largely what i feel i pay for w/the LRB. not so much deep thought as counter-intuitive elements that help me pin down some larger phenom. cf the petrarch piece, which was full of these :)

meek tbf does provide these, even if largely anecdotal-empirical (i.e. he goes out and talks to farmers, which i have not really done since i was a kid and moved to the hateful city)

absolutely and meek is usually v good. i just found his newspaper one a bit weak by his standards. and yes that was the post I was thinking of, thx.

probably i’m asking of the lrb something it’s not intending to do but the explanatory-analytical framework stands back from its judgments other than in the small book review bit of each essay - the treatment of rusbridger in the meek piece was a good example - and i could sometimes wish for a bit more interrogation. less passivity in the face of their subject. if they’ve gone to the trouble of reaching deep in to a subject (and i totally agree on the usefulness of counter-intuitive points) then i’d like to hear their thoughts on the future direction and possible ways which the situation might be improved or changed for the better.

i'm thinking about this bcz i'm right now writing something abt another august and stately journal, and it suddenly occurred to me that -- when "augustness and stateliness" are a key part of yr brand (and thus get all in among yr politics -- it's actualy quite hard to do the other bit of journalism, which is someone running in waving some bit of paper or a photo or a recording or whatever yelling "OMG HAVE YR HEARD/READ/SEEN THIS! we need to do something on it/about it PDQ, this CHANGES EVERYTHING"

where there's a sense that the urgency can for a week or so be offset against the (august and stately) accuracy, the omg the PRESENT and the FUTURE depend on it etc. It's a mode that LRB is entirely set against, at least since it stopped employing Cockburn and Hitchens and Paul Foot. There's good reason to turn yr nose up at it in its present form, it's actually very extrmnely corroded and degraded in media at large currently*! But it's a mode journalism needs also to deal with and here and there to exhibit -- and I think a dimension that Meek piece on media did not really look at at all.

*the alt-listings model was killed by (a) the internet very effectively unbundling a good cross-subsidy model and (b) all kinds of parasitic hedge-fund orgs buying up titles and asset stripping them for short-term profit. the gawker-model ran full tilt into the problem of its own contradictions -- "let's tell ALL the gossip that journalists know but keep to themselves!" -- which is that what was needed as a strong renegotation of the acceptable limits of which stories journalists shd not in fact pass on. in the UK the alt-tabloid model (skwawkbox/the canary) has entirely failed to decorrode or dedegrade the latent value of yellow journalism (which is NOT NOTHING: speed may nopt be a virtue but it *is* an existent quality and therefore has to be tackled and managed).

that's v interesting.

and immediately and btw i totally agree that speed is a virtue and in the respects you outline both in the 1st para and in yr note *is* journalism (bcos of my lol Front Page view of it - the ability to write at short notice high impact copy that conveys the sense of a thing happening to people who aren't experiencing it).

i'm trying to tease out some thoughts, but I'm going to put down the unwinnowed version here to see if it helps:

Is the problem not speed per se, but in fact speed combined with a massive increase in volume?* our ability to generate and distribute/transmit data has massively increased, and urgency is often confused with 'this thing is happening now'. Our ability (in terms of industry and also in terms of individual journalists and readers) to editorially make a decision about newsworthiness is completely swamped). The notion of story angle has vanished in this process, and going begging for a master, 'angle' has been hijacked by the politics and motives of power <- this feels as good a definition of that unhelpfully inclusive term 'fake news' as any.

in this model, you will get a natural convergence of the wide range of news between gossip and Big Important Things (i consider gossip important and entertaining, but it's useful to be able to maintain a separation), and a flattening out of the moral, editorial and lifespan perspective.

if we look elsewhere, for instance at places generating massive amounts of data - Candy Crush for instance - the process of sifting and finding meaning in that is algorithmic. And as we all know, the same logic is being applied by Facebook etc to make editorial decisions. of course the editorial principles at play are entirely alien to the traditional notion of editorial policy. Although rule-based heuristics and algorithms are very close, the idea of heuristics as 'good-enough' judgment based on certain environmentally useful principles, and data crunching as processing massive data and generating 'insight' based on useful patterns, that are close to specific business requirements (flagging a criminal transaction eg) they have different consequences.

i feel in some way the conditions for the urgent speed/august accuracy styles or methods to contribute to each other and be successful and useful have entirely liquidated. This I think is yr corrosion. Stately/August accuracy can seem irrelevant, urgent speed, a froth of time-expiring info, whose mayfly life-span is shorter than the ability to place it into a structure of verifying/truth-testing etc (twitter is the overridingly obvious example, but i would expand it to include the general aspect of news-without-import which has been characteristic of the brexit period, and the churning through of publicity via press releases via the wires). The two methods can in no way communicate. This seems to me to be a very bad thing, without a solution currently. I guess 'Long Reads' as they've emerged in the press (rather than having been always present in other ah organs and periodicals etc) are a fairly obvious example of this problem being perceived and an attempt to solve it being put in place (I'm not sneering - the long reads can often be very good - i'm more interested that they have appeared and have this name, but i don't think they are in any way a solution).

point being the processors of this and validators of this information in the Stately August mode are detached, and their function moribund, other than as the useful and necessary explanatory force, but this detachment probably produces the sad nodding along, at its worst represented by Lanchester's boilerplate takes, the articles produce. not quite history, not quite news, yes you're right, but kind of so what? Telling us accurately that we're all going down the shitter has limitd appeal. and lol let's face it the lrb's turnaround times mean that they're often giving their verdict well after everyone's forgotten what prompted it. I'm being harsh. James Meek's extraordinary piece on Afghanistan of a few years ago, had the ability to reconfigure, with detail, historical narrative in a way that gave insight both into and beyond its subject. Same with his chocolate factory piece. But i do feel there is a sort of ex cathedra decadence to being *right* here – it needs an edge of judgment bringing it back to the current conjuncture, back into the froth and frenzy from which it is detached, rather than 'and this is why we are where we are today' FIN.

more generally i feel the crisis of legitimacy which i hook on to the post global financial crash world, but which in terms of distal causes can be assigned to the end of the cold war and the establishment of the neoliberal end of history consensus, is in represented here in this split, and via that is seeping into actual questions of style.

*I was at a localisation (dubbing and subtitle translation, regional video conforming) conference the other day. A model which had been stable has now been entirely destabilised by the huge increase in volume of video assets driven by the OTT (over-the-top internet rather than broadcast/networks/cable) platforms like Netflix. What broke? There's too much to translate, not enough translators. Why isn't that stimulating demand? Because translators and voice talent aren't getting paid more. Why not? Because the per-asset price agreement with the customer was not linked to volume, and so was a promise to pay no matter what the volume. The supply of people able to process the material is fundamentally out of whack with the amount of material that needs to be processed and no one's got the capability to generate more money out of the procurement system. I found this interesting because in an area I understand, you have a model of both the secular stagnation problem (high employment, but inflation not going up, wages only going up slightly, the breaking of the Philips Curve), and the consequent problem of growth fucking an industry, which sounds ridiculous.

The death of the Phillips curve in one chart: While unemployment rate in the Eurozone has dropped to 7.8% in Jan, the lowest since Sep2008, core inflation has also fallen, contrary to the theory of the Phillips curve. pic.twitter.com/fCmXuZCdsp

— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) March 1, 2019

as elsewhere the expected solution is from AI//macbhine learning/algorithmic approaches - ie the knowledge industry being automated in the way manufacturing was in the 19th C - in this case via machine translation. this has a place, but it fundamentally changes the process and in ways that are quite difficult to define the end output, in fact the fabric of our intellectual perception gets rewoven but such production changes. algorithmic processing is not in itself bad, but produces a subtly different sausage. i'll give a very basic example bcos that's probably a little abstract. in order to get through higher volumes of media translation, machine translation (MT) is used to generate an initial transcript 500 times quicker than it will take a translator to do so. A subsequent human QC process will take much longer than a QC process on a human translation, but only by about half. So the overall productivity is massively increased. However translators doing the QC have to be told to avoid correcting things like 'house' to 'home', ie re-translating, as this will massively reduce productivity. They are asked to – division of labour time – split out the process of *editing* from the process of *translating*. The output is subtly different. In a sense dehumanised. Interestingly, it may be more effective to get domain specialists to correct the machine translation (which will often get domain specific stuff wrong - medicine, IT, fly fishing - unless specifically trained on it). These domain specialists will get the mechanics of the content right, but the translation will be left as is, apart from where it is evidently garbage.

Does it matter? I'm not sure it makes any difference whether it matters, but i do think it changes the cultural fabric of the world, and again, in ways that are difficult for us to perceive or articulate.

machine-learning does human faces: thispersondoesnotexist

the faces are (mostly) ok but their relationship to their surroundings (hats) is unsettling if largely antic, and their relationship to other ppl in the picture (and sometimes just to their own ears or skin) quickly gets lovecraftian

in general i think our culture *is* processing and responding to this, but our cultural institutions are trapped in a kind of double deathspiral of required models: (A) of how to frame these changes in time to reconnect the stable archive to the frothing moment, and (of course) (B) how to pay for themselves :(

yes, that seems the problem in a nutshell. i would expect to see more a more protean set of styles as the channels of the printed word tried to find new ways to reconnect, which in part is why i've been so pleased with some of the LRB's more unusual forays, and the effort they've made at the very least to increase the number of women writing after that disastrous issue of a couple of years ago.

i have to say as well, that buried on the page under the mountain of Perry Anderson, the At the Ashmolean piece about Hadrian's infatuation with Antinous, and Hadrian's power to disseminate his image everywhere and erect cities in his name, and attach constellations to his eternal existence, felt like a wonderful example of how substantial and strange-seeming the reconfigurations of culture and power can be throughout history.

I still mostly think that the LRB is quite well written, and better written than most other publications that I see. So I wouldn't want to be too critical of its house style if there is one.

On the other hand I could agree that there could be something in Fizzles' criticism and his wish for other styles - eg: more polemical, opinionated or uncompromising? Unsure if that's what he means; I am reading Empson again at the moment - he's opinionated but frankly not very clear most of the time, so I'm not sure he counts as 'going in hard'. I now recall that Empson used to write for the LRB!

Unfortunately the other mode that Fizzles wants to see more of, in the kind of examples he cites, eg Lockwood, I tend to think is dreadful.

I have still not received the current - is it current? - issue. This is fairly typical.

I don't know whether this reflects anything broader about the LRB.

Yes, “Empson” in his “I think x is wrong because” mode, imitating the texture of his thought, which seems so often to produce a logic so opaque as to have to be taken on faith (enjoyable as it is) is probably a v bad idea.

Do you dislike Lockwood specifically? Or is it the wider set of what I consider new strategies in say Maggie Nelson for uncovering meaning or allowing it to emerge from adjecancies rather than more structured or linear argument? (That in itself may be opaque so I can expand if necessary)

i like empson. i also like that he loathed derrida -- who i also like and feel often took his stands on quite similar ground (inc.style viz " a logic so opaque as to have to be taken on faith (enjoyable as it is)")

I think 'everybody likes Empson' - literally there are dozens of different people who have written very favourably about him and I can't think of anyone who has done the opposite. I have read Michael Wood's whole (naturally hugely favourable) book on Empson.

So I like him also. And I keep reading SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY. But it is very slow going, very clotted. While I can see things to admire, I can't say it's usually saying something very clear.

If there is a simpler or more straightforward Empson, maybe it can be found in his LRB contributions?

Derrida, a few years ago I realized I did not really understand, so stopped.

Lockwood, I have found dreadful.

Not sure I have read Nelson but what I read about one of her books gave me the impression I would think the same about her.

Fizzles presented two ways forward for the LRB - more self-indulgence and more straightforward strong opinions. I guess I am saying the latter sounds better.

empson is an all-time favourite. forceful. strong. funny (cf the famous portrait of shakespeare which gives him the impression shakespeare has just come from a large banquet where he has had several rounds of wine, but is keeping his assurance such that he might say “I’ll be all right if I’m not joggled” to an anxious lady). almost magical at times (that opacity). his dismissals are almost thrilling. he’s constantly *at it* - pushing it, looking visibly using his considerable intellectual tools - argufying is a good term for him.

i think both would be good. i think the times call for more strategies and methods being used. naturally i wouldn’t call their style self-indulgent. tho i would note that certainly nelson, briggs, galchen and to a degree in the last samurai dewitt have all written about the need to have a writing structure and approach that can accommodate having a child, the interruptions of the world, of other needs, into the main focus of work. this obviously contra the pram in the hallway. that i would agree could be called indulgent, even self indulgent but not of course with any of the moral judgment of rules not being adhered to the phrase normally implies.

xxp

"more self-indulgence": lol this is a highly contentious and loaded interpretation of what fizzles in fact suggested, given the context of his and my discussion!

(caveat: i haven't read the lockwood piece, probably bcz it touches on things i have possibly non-straightforward strong opinions on -- viz how to engage with newly emergent models of information exchange, and what they night be doing to us -- so i don't to leave it till i'm sleepily in bed as per usual)

semi-related disgression: does the LRB still run poems? i have got so used to never ever reading them in all the time i've been reading it (since 1983 i think) that i didn't spot if/when it stopped -- there seem to be none in the most recent issues to hand?

fwiw i should say i don't think the internet piece fully worked. she herself points out it was a lecture and it's clear it would be better suited to that format, but i was pleased to see it there.

it does. but perhaps less frequently (and the lockwood piece also triggered a similar thought - what space is this occupying in the editor's mind?). iirc there was one bloody seidel poem in the grenfell issue, can that be right?

actually it had four poems in, including a Seidel.

and the latest one also does, tho like the pinefox i have not yet received mine.

I don't think I have ever really enjoyed or appreciated a poem in the LRB.

I have often disliked one.

My point about Empson is: we can all stand around saying he's great, but what about his tendency to be incomprehensible?

I would like more of the straight talking strong opinions that Fizzles values in him, less of the involution.

semi-related disgression: does the LRB still run poems? i have got so used to never ever reading them in all the time i've been reading it (since 1983 i think) that i didn't spot if/when it stopped -- there seem to be none in the most recent issues to hand?

― mark s, Sunday, 3 March 2019 14:44 (two hours ago) Permalink

There are a couple of poems every issue. Anne Carson has one in the latest and she is almost always great (although I haven't gone through the full archive: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/anne-carson)

Rebecca Tamas -- who is often good on twitter and has a collection out soon -- had one published a while back and again this is another example of the LRB sourcing new voices: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n19/rebecca-tamas/palermo

seven types of ambiguity (all of them bad) by william empfox

Bringing things back once again to Powell/Proust/Anderson, here's an Anthony Powell entry on Empson that I just read in the last volume of his journals (this one is from 31.3.1992):

I read William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, never done before... Empson is always enjoyable, although, as with all professional literary critics, one cannot share the excessive hair-splitting of meaning, although Empson's humour is always immensely enjoyable. When he makes quotations, Shakespeare to Omar Khayyam, he always has something both funny and apposite to say (for instance, Proust's novel being like a description of a novel that unfortunately has been lost.) Wish I had known Empson beyond meeting him once (perhaps a couple of times), when I was able to tell him how pleased I was when he referred to something Templer said, as if everyone ought to know who Templer is.

(re poems in recent issues: i have apparently trained myself so well not to read them that i no longer even see them when looking right at them)

I like that description of Proust. Surely it's not in SEVEN TYPES?

I can't quickly find out, because my copy of SEVEN TYPES has a publisher's note pasted in the front saying that it doesn't have an Index even though Empson says it does.

From LRB archive:

William Empson and ‘Advanced Thought’
SIR: One thing about Sir William’s very peculiar piece (LRB, 24 January): unless he has access to Greville’s notes, he cannot know that Sidney said ‘need’, for Greville in his book says ‘necessity’; he, not I, preferred the long fussy word.

Frank Kermode
King’s College, Cambridge

William Empson writes: I am sure Kermode is right. If I had checked, I would have ascribed the mistake to Greville. Everyone who recalls the legend says ‘thy need’, and that is what Sidney would have said.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n02/letters#letter4

Empson writing about things I actually already know about: comprehensible and fun in the way we all like.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n15/william-empson/the-ultimate-novel

(that is, I understand him here - maybe when I don't understand him it's partly because I just don't know the field.)

"Parodies are appreciative criticisms in this sense, and much of Proust reads like the work of a superb appreciative critic upon a novel which has unfortunately not survived."

p249 of 7ToA as made available here: https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.215758/2015.215758.Seven-Types_djvu.txt

also this version has an index, though the page numbers may not be right for yr edition

Wish I could read the whole review. Never thought of Ulysses as sad, though, not even comic-sad.

I can't disagree with that.

I did make the effort to read the whole 2-part review online; my recollection is that it only initially pretends to be a review and then becomes a 20,000-word Empson statement on Ulysses, offering a bizarre biographical and sexual reading. In fact I think this material may appear again in Empson's USING BIOGRAPHY.

I gave up on that Lockwood piece halfway through - it seems I'm not as Extremely Online as she is, or not in the same way, so many of the points raised were things I couldn't identify with and others were things I couldn't see why she was so worried about. I understand the diffuseness is part of the deal, but I dunno.

lol now you've amde it a competition i'm going to have to read it

I liked the Lockwood piece. I’m also not as plugged in as she is, I only got a Twitter account this year, but I could relate a bit to the evocation of online meme culture, even via the little bit that filters into ILX.

the lockwood piece is not for me

i think she's a brilliant writer but pretty much only when she's not writing about the internet

see: her poems that are sorta internet jokes vs. her poems that aren't related to the internet at all

in an irritating sort of way way i feel this discussion is proving my point.

also

Attn: Subscribers. Due to a machine breakdown at our fulfilment house last week some issues of 41/5 were a little late going out. If you haven't had your copy yet it should be with you in the next day or so though (in the UK). Sorry about that and thank you for your patience! pic.twitter.com/uYUAmoelPL

— London Review of Books (@LRB) March 5, 2019

They're still sending me emails every other day, even though I cancelled my subscription and twice asked them to remove me from their email list.

Isn't there an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email?

I liked the Lockwood piece a lot - the internet makes you smarter, but it also pulverizes your brain.

Possibly, I've never reached the bottom of one of their emails I usually delete them automatically.

Yeah, I am online-clueless, but that Lockwood piece was such a pleasure sentence by sentence that I didn't care.

carry on at this rate Tom you’ll get your first LRB in a couple of weeks despite cancelling and them having the wrong address. cue huge dumper truck piled high with perry anderson screeds pulling up outside your Palais de Tom D.

Yes, I, like Tom D and Fizzles, quite often have trouble obtaining my copy.

Fizzles, how is the discussion proving your point?

i felt the split of intelligent, literary and well read people itt on the recent lockwood piece indicated that it was generating judgment about approach and style in a way that say a standard highly authoritative piece can preclude. i think this is a good thing.

the reason i felt it was a bit cheeky or unhelpful to say this is there probably can be a bit of a slippery slope that says “if it’s controversial it must be good” which wouldn’t be my intention to recommend.

i do think experimenting with new methods to tackle, represent and analyse the contemporary world is a valuable thing the lrb can do, and that this was doing that.

I also felt that Lockwood’s more conventional piece on Cusk *was* good, and unconventional in its manner, and more representative of the mode described above, enabling the personal world of the writer to be present as part of the essay or analysis.

speaking as editor of wire long ago i strongly felt it was right and proper that at least some of the coverage also took experimental* form: esp as (A) the wire is/is a mag dedicated to the understanding and exploration of, among other things, the experimental, and (B) too much writing abt the avant garde is bad not good bcz the formal underpinnings and conventions of the writing run counter to the the formal underpinnings and conventions of the cap-E Experimental. and this is a clash that’s under-addressed bcz the unspoken demands of quality in the writing bleed back into how readers come to understand the avant garde. hence the wire is a journal that covers the avant-garde but almost never in any sense an avant-garde publication

the problem being that editors who can judge both are far and few between if they exist at all, and what you actually tend to get — as you get in the LRB, as we’ve established — is a formal subdivision within the magazine between the “experimental” (which PF is calling “self-indulgent” and the LRB largely refers to as “poetry”) (or “new short story by john lanchester”) so that you don’t read both sections as if they have purchase on one another.

AND MAYBE THEY DON’T, bcz they are not treated as if they ought to. So I suppose we are exploring the question “how would things work if they were so treated, and in fact how would we even bring this about, with the tools to hand as we understand them?”)

adding: it suddenly occurred to me as I was writing this that — since one of the consequences of major shifts in information delivery, viz the arrival of the book, the arrival of television, the arrival of twitter, is significant traumatic estrangement between generations* — that the function of editing and sub-editing for “quality” is a highly routinised management of potential readership-trauma lol, and that this is both good not bad and bad not good…

*arrival of the book —> 30 years war inc. english civil war, among other wars, invasions, colonisations, erasures and worse

the tricia internet piece is one of my favourite pieces of writing in years, it truly spoke to my experience lol

(or “new short story by john lanchester”

i would like to make it clear to the committee that this is a mode i in no way endorse as “a method for tackling the contemporary conjuncture”.

I see there is a new podcast, called The State of... This month features John Lanchester, discussing 'the internet'.

fizzles's cunning plan proceeds apace

soon lanchester will be the only mode. lanchester on bloby the logos.

i saw there was an entire f’ing lrb podcast interview with lanchester about “the wall”, by david runciman, someone who keeps nosediving further and further down in my estimation (from a fairly high point i should add - i used to find him very useful on politics and now feel pretty much everything he says is suspect or in some way bogus). i couldn’t bring myself to listen to it.

i mean i think the thing is they very evidently ARE trying to address the "contemporary conjuncture” issue via lanchester :((((((((((((((

i think the o'hagan/grenfell piece also fell into this zone (and also that in the past he's been pointed at "conjuncture" stuff with varying levels of result: bitcoin, assange, a piece on farming many years ago which i remember liking, a piece on "the disappeared" in ref fred west (bcz i think he knew a victim or else someone who vanished who may have been a victim), and (again a piece i felt i liked at the time) something on kids and cruelty after the bulger case...

I see there is a new podcast, called The State of... This month features John Lanchester, discussing 'the internet'.

Patricia Lockwood's on it too!

Her recent piece on Lucia Berlin was also excellent: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n23/patricia-lockwood/sex-on-the-roof

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dwd6ZfJU8AA9lmg.jpg

'Rău, rău!' Patricia kept shouting

I am sad that you haven't listened to the podcast, Fizzles. There was a good bit in which JL was talking about (NB DODGY SUMMATION OF POINT FOLLOWS) how fo course he knew all this unnecessary detail about the world as depicted in his fiction, but the skill was to leave so much of it out; I enjoyed the thought of you spluttering at that.

speaking as editor of wire long ago i strongly felt it was right and proper that at least some of the coverage also took experimental* form: esp as (A) the wire is/is a mag dedicated to the understanding and exploration of, among other things, the experimental, and (B) too much writing abt the avant garde is bad not good bcz the formal underpinnings and conventions of the writing run counter to the the formal underpinnings and conventions of the cap-E Experimental. and this is a clash that’s under-addressed bcz the unspoken demands of quality in the writing bleed back into how readers come to understand the avant garde. hence the wire is a journal that covers the avant-garde but almost never in any sense an avant-garde publication

It strikes me that with whatever we might call experimental music - possibly experimental literature, too - there's probably more of a demand from readers to have things explained via translation into a non-experimental language, i.e. ppl feel they're not "getting it", or not fully anyway, and tend towards conventional, accessible explainers more than they would if you're writing about Stax or whatever. Which I get must be frustrating for initiates.

I really enjoyed that Berlin piece - it felt weirdly far from the usual LRB mode - crossed over into a personal enthusiasm* that almost felt _gauche_ by the conventions of English literary journalism. This is good not bad - it's one of the few pieces in there that actually made me pay attention and want to read someone.

I liked her internet piece. I don't know why you'd pair her with Lanchester to talk about the web, she just seems brilliantly far ahead of that plodder both in understanding and ability to describe.

*not to be confused with slightly stiff formal anecdote about the circs in which you first read an author.

more of a demand from readers to have things explained via translation into a non-experimental language

this is true, for sure -- and i have no beef with writing that genuinely works towards this… but a lot of the so-called translation i was reacting against was stuff basically checking the avant-garde item off on a general list of the things avant-gardism is Held To Be, politically or futurologically or whatever. so it wasn't really translation at all, but projection, via the micro-medium of shunting around an artist's promo phrases and self-description on a fuzzyfelt board to produce the needed correlation

(actually fuzzyfelt is too sweet a word but i have to get to work lol)

On Empson, I think one mode of his difficulty is down to a few things that have come up above:

a) assuming that the reader knows what he's talking about
b) something like amazingly confident anti-scholarship - just reading half of someone's entry in the DNB and deciding to have a crack at historical/biographical reading based on that and guesswork.
d) Using that casual, engaging style to present the above (along with his unusual personal sensibility) as completely obvious, just something straightforward that people happen to have missed

I'd say one of his great virtues is being magnificently wrong. Like you're in the middle of this baffling, bluffing, brilliant trick, your miles from where any conventional critic would have landed you (and it's all being presented as 'well, this is just common sense') and you have to think or argue your way out of it for yourself.

(He's not always like this of course - sometimes just brilliant)

Fizzles:

I share your view of Runciman.

I haven't actually read the Lockwood internet article - I seem to have filed that issue away having only managed the first couple of paras. My thoughts on Lockwood were more re: her earlier LRB essays.

So again, I don't share others' enthusiasm for those. The line about writers looking like murderers I find quite a good example of something that is bad and irritating about her.

I'm afraid I also disagree with your statement that the thread has proved your point, basically for the reason you give yourself:

the reason i felt it was a bit cheeky or unhelpful to say this is there probably can be a bit of a slippery slope that says “if it’s controversial it must be good” which wouldn’t be my intention to recommend.

I respect the case here about Empson, which is clearly founded on great knowledge of him as a writer. What I am getting at with him is not so much whether his arguments are right or wrong, but more simply that he can be clotted and snarled up. I'm happy to read his controversial bold arguments, as long as they are simply clear enough to follow rather than a vast para of involution on something whose identity I never knew about in the first place.

I find it quite likely that SEVEN TYPES is more clotted than much later work.

The line about writers looking like murderers I find quite a good example of something that is bad and irritating about her.

otm

What I am getting at with him is not so much whether his arguments are right or wrong, but more simply that he can be clotted and snarled up

true, point taken - it eases off laater on, but 7 Types and The Structure of Complex Words both have that logic-problem tangledness that I do find fun, but at some point it turns into "no, you've lost me there"

I have owned SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL for years but I have never really been able to make sense of Empson's idea of pastoral. It does not seem to have anything to do with pastoral literature and art as I have experienced it.

"in a sense there is nothing that is not a pie" — william empson

I have owned SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL for years but I have never really been able to make sense of Empson's idea of pastoral. It does not seem to have anything to do with pastoral literature and art as I have experienced it.

THIS IS THE CORRECT WAY TO DO WRITING in my extremely under-commissioned opinion

The line about writers looking like murderers I find quite a good example of something that is bad and irritating about her.

Isn't it self-evident that most writers are kinda unhinged in some way - she is just taking it one level up with that remark.

And on twitter one of the memes that takes off is the "please run me over" one. Readers are begging to be killed by writers. Its cool.

I finally received the new issue.

David Bromwich seems less bad than usual.

Isn't it self-evident that most writers are kinda unhinged in some way - she is just taking it one level up with that remark.

thanks for explaining it, it still isn't good

it made me laugh \o/

i really liked Christopher Clark's recent piece on the revolutions of 1848. it probably falls into Fizzles' "August structural rightness but so what" mode but still

il liked discovering that the a in a.r.ammons stands for archie :)

Notes:

1: I was wrong to say that Bromwich was OK. The article turned into a combination of dull personal anecdote and nasty, unfounded attack on people he perceives as less sensibly centrist than himself. If it was a UK article it would probably be telling us that Tom Watson or Jess Phillips was the Labour Party's best hope.

2: Clark on 1848 OK - informative maybe about something I really know little about. The one memorable aspect of it I suppose was its tendency to make things contemporary by comparing 1848 to Arab Spring, newspapers to social media, etc.

3: Still reading Ammons article, don't like it at all - the bit I had got up to was the worst kind of indulgence that the LRB (and others) gives to aimless writing. I don't know Ammons himself at all and don't comment on him.

when does the aimless writing begin in the ammons piece? (i too am only a short way into it, i haven't taken against it yet)

For me, the worst bit yet is the para starting 'In the past' on the 2nd page.

'I write this to be writing' - good for him, maybe, but not necessarily worthwhile to anyone else.

maybe ilx shd do a podcast abt what's bad in the new lrb each time it comes out

tom ewing pointed out on facebook that the cover looks like a buttplug: https://cdn.lrb.co.uk/assets/covers/m/cov4105.jpg

tho that is (a) not very podcast-y content (visual) and (b) not very pinefox-y content (mildly dirty joke)

Agreed !

Given that I have never heard of Ammons before, the Ammons article to me is like a parody - 'what if the LRB invented a poet and reviewed his Selected Poems'? Very generic. Would be good as a parody.

Colin Burrow on Propertius also bad in a different way - blokeish familiarity and joshing sexual innuendo, from an unwelcome source.

Started David Thomson who has the virtue of being David Thomson.

once registered lrlrb (london review of london review of books) on twitter to use as a lrb grousing account. Never got round to doing anything with it.

ammons’ sphere is one of the best poems i’ve ever read

i haven’t read the piece but figured i should comment on ammons

David Thomson is embarrassing, and nobody should ever let him write about Nicole Kidman ever again

Are you content for him to write about other people?

Burrow on Propertius was really, really good in the sense that he took care to review it in the context of what a reader might think of it today. I certainly would pick up a translattion.

The Ammons review was fine from what I read of it. There isn't anything aimless about it - starts of with a 'this is a poet that matters' which is the opposite of aimless, in fact - which is probably why I didn't finish it (although I would've done if I wasn't so tired). Tries to build a lot of enthusiasm.

Looking at the current LRB issue and Michael Wood on Brecht was an OK discussion, still mulling it over.

On the poetry corner I liked Lieke Marsman a lot - https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n06/lieke-marsman/three-poems

A small clarification: I didn't say that the review of Ammons was aimless, but that Ammons' own poetry appeared, at least at one point, to be aimless - which the poetry virtually acknowledges: 'I write this to be writing' - and that the review was too indulgent of this.

In this and in other ways, I found the review very generically LRB, which curiously connects to what others have (negatively) said about LRB house style, though they don't seem bothered by this particular review.

The Propertius review was founded in an extensive knowledge of the history of translations and editions, and was quite informative for those of us who don't know the material.

Unfortunately I also found its tone often misjudged.

re Thomson, he is 78 and one could well suspect that he is past it. Perhaps he is.

Yet, oddly, this particular recent review (Who is Michael Ovitz?) doesn't give any hint of that.

Except - I have just remembered his curious parenthetical reference to agents' fees, where he insists that LRB readers need to know the diffeerence between film and literature in this regard. Unsure whether that's a tonal veering.

He has only ever written 9 pieces for the LRB, some of them short:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/david-thomson

The new edition arrived yesterday. I'm not near to opening it yet.

(Edition? -- I mean: issue, of the LRB.)

PS: self-critical note re Ammons discussion: my original comment on Ammons was not very clear and inaccurately said that I had nothing to say about Ammons (in general I don't - had never heard of him before) where in fact I had just complained about his aimless poetry as quoted by the LRB, which counts as saying something about him.

Regarding this issue, we never discussed 'Adam Phillips on Misogyny'.

Probably a good thing. I finally attempted it again yesterday and gave up. It didn't really seem to be talking about anything I could recognize as misogyny.

Well it's a review of a book about misogyny understood as a structural/political phenomenon - or so I understand from the review, which admittedly does go on in typical LRB fashion for six paragraphs about his own experiences as a psychotherapist before informing us the book is "usefully and tellingly sceptical of all such ‘psychological’ explanations".

yes i saw a *lot* of eyerolling on twitter when ppl there saw who was writing the misogyny review

Some writers bring a personal energy that is a relief from the house style: Ian Penman, Terry Castle off the top of my head, neither appears very often (altho TC used to). Lockwood maybe too much so.

Ledge: yes, precisely, the review seemed to spend most of the time at cross purposes to the book. I gave up. It didn't make me feel positive about Freudian thought.

A fairly distinctive and also entertaining writer who used to be in the LRB a lot, now isn't: Ian Sansom.

The current LRB, in terms of number of named contributors, appears to be 50/50 male / female. I wonder if this is the first time that has happened.

To add a little to the Ammons and Sextus discussion: in both cases — I think this is also more or less what PF is saying — I think the issue is that the topic at issue is potentially interesting, but that neither reviewer really makes the case well. But in both cases, I don’t quite agree with pf’s diagnosis.

I had heard off Ammons, and even read a little — though I’d forgotten this. I’m no kind of an expert in recent US poetry — but I have read several of Harold Bloom’s tracts on poetry as whole, in particular his wild-style psychokabbalistic trilogy, The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, and Agon. Ammons features in all three, as the most recent in the specific line of strong poets that Bloom is establishing, a figure (he proposes in the early 70s) who will still being read, and still be inspiring and troubling poets in 20 or 40 or 100 years, casting the kind of spell that these future poets will be fighting their way out of, their first the poetry they are then making. A fragment from ‘The City Limits’ (“the guiltiest / swervings of the weaving heart”) form the epigraph to Anxiety of Influence, in fact, which is surely an indication what high regard Bloom holds him in.

And Matthew Bevis mentions this regard — and remarks on how astonishing Bloom’s essays on him are — but then says nothing more about them. And he starts his review (fatally, really, in terms of contentful critique) with a justification that amounts to “Ammons is important because important people say he’s important”, before veering off into a readable but (in terms of justification) irrelevant column of backstory. Biography may well illuminate the poems, but it isn’t what makes them any good.

Then Bevis quotes Helen Vendler, saying Ammons is “the first American poet to whom the discourse of the basic sciences was entirely natural” — which seems a promising enough line of potential justification, except it’s instantly abandoned and never returned to. And by column three we’re off into a welter of ways to associate the poetry with uncertainty, indifference, reserve, a mannerist will to a seeming ordinariness. And we speed past Bloom’s claims to arrive at the long reaches of makeweight stuff that apparently fill this Complete Poems. Which I guess as a reviewer he does have to tackle, except he (a) wants to place them at the centre and (b) doesn’t then seem to want to counterpose them with or work them into Bloom’s arguments about strong poets and strong poetry (or Vendler’s about science). To me, better editing would dig right into this apparent clash, because I think it’s the core of this review — Ammons’ own swerve away from the strong poetry of Bloom’s strong claims for Ammons as strong poet. As it is, all this is just skated over.

So when PF says aimlessness, I don’t quite agree: indeed the quoted line he used to exemplify this specifically contains an aim: writing just to be writing is an aim. Just not one that readers will necessarily have any patience with, if the work produced isn’t good (which Bevis seems to think — at this point — it isn’t). And yet when he gets down the the work of close-reading actual poems (three limpidly close observations of nature on the move: two about snails, a longer one about eagles and — I guess, given its title, ‘Easter Morning’ and final lines — Christian faith), the review does finally clarify into something that isn’t one writer’s pathless evasion passing under and around another’s ditto. It takes way too long to get there: the snail stuff should open the piece, with the tunnelling into Bloom right and wrong next.

__________

The Sextus review too suffers a bit from inadequate editing — though more from the writer’s style. Which I think is a problem even when he isn’t writing about sex: I was already sighing in para 2, when he says “where both the literal and cultural wonga was”. A couple of columns on he totally bludges the jokey reference and transition pun to asterisks, obelisks, Asterix and Dogmatix (which depends on the notion that no book is more full of asterisks or obelisks than Asterix the Gaul… which isn’t even true of comic books when he’s referring to grawlices and the like). And he gets Housman wrong also, I think, for the sake of a formalist gag about his sexuality: “so aware of the follies of mankind that he didn’t much like men either”…

I mean there’s something genuinely interesting to me about a classical poet so veiled in poorly transmitted versions of actual real and deliberate masked games-play that a genuinely high-end and world-class classical scholar like Housman chooses to lollop over out of his comfort zone towards straight-up Botticellian invention, to fill in some lost lines (if that’s what Burrows is actually claiming, which isn’t altogether clear). This is where this piece should start — except if it did, I think the glibness count would be way worse.

Anyway, what I’d like to see more of in this essay is the connections between contested translations of corrupted manuscripts, projection from the present into ambiguous classical texts, and transformative moments in poetry and culture (Petrarch and Renaissance humanism; Pound and literary modernism). And also (in re these same issues) the question of poets who change with the political wind, as Propertius and Pound both did. The pun we want centred is “corruption”, not asterisk — and the ways corruptions at either end pull towards one another, for ill or good.

lol speaking of editing: "I think the issue is that the topic at issue"

oh ffs: "their first the poetry they are then making" = "their fight the poetry they are then making" sorry i am tired from book launching and etc

I like Mark S's post. It's generous of him to refer to me and not to be too unfavourable, in such a substantial contribution of his own.

One obvious feature of his post is that it comes across as an editor's comments, writing about what contributors should do. I don't really know whether Mark S's past work as an editor has involved this kind of work with people's writing, but his post gives the impression that it has.

Some time, maybe the next ILB FAP, I would like to hear about the Cambridge HIDDEN LANDSCAPE tour.

I had indeed forgotten how much the Ammons review talks about Harold Bloom. I found this very odd. I didn't know the details of Bloom's treatment of Ammons as Mark did.

I'd also forgotten about Vendler's comment, but actually it was one that annoyed me in the review. It doesn't feel true enough to be worth saying as such a big declaration, as lots of US poets had surely been interested in science in its different forms. William Carlos Williams would seem the most obvious as he was a kind of scientist in his practical way. Eliot uses scientific language in his most famous works (a patient etherized, a catalyst ...). Pound liked to invoke science too, and I have a feeling (from a 2nd-hand recollection) that Marianne Moore was quite big on science. I suspect you could go back through the 19th century and find earlier versions. My listing these obvious names isn't impressive, others could list other names, but I think it hints that Vendler may have been misleading. And I don't recall most of the Ammons quoted in the review being very scientific anyway!

one thing i can say about my booktour to cambridge (and nowhere else yet) is that i realised it was the first time i had set foot in the town for FORTY YEARS*

*or possibly 39 but 40 sounds better and i actually genuinely can't remember or calculate

It's slightly odd that Mark S says he doesn't agree with me about Burrow on Propertius, as he seems to have very much the same kind of problem with it as me: the reviewer, who must be a middle-aged Oxford don, comes across like a guffawing public schoolboy. The lines Mark quotes show this painfully. I didn't like or trust this, but I do feel that such a problem becomes even worse when the same writer addresses sex - which happens to be a major topic of this review.

Though, again, the basic history of missing and fragmented texts, unreliable translations, etc, remains a substantial one, and Burrow knows enough about it to show us something despite his misjudgments as a writer.

I had forgotten that Cambridge was a return for you.

re burrow: you said "joshing sexual innuendo", but i think the problem is larger than that and doesn't in fact just apply to sex -- so it's only a minor disagreement, of precision of focus really

re vendler: she says discourse rather than language, which i assume is a difference with a significance, and of course she's a world-class authority on poetry so i imagine she isn't just making a silly blunder about priority here, but has a genuine point in mind, right or wrong -- however as bevis fails to expand or her explain argument, and no subsequent quotes seem to exemplify it, who knows? this is indeed something a good editor should be saying: "explain this better or leave it out"

here's a long piece by vendler on ammons: https://harpers.org/archive/2017/08/american-expansion/

it's where the vendler line is from ("Nonetheless, he was the first American poet for whom the discourse of the basic sciences was entirely natural", on p.3) and it beds the point in much better with examples. it's just much better generally, really -- and looks to me (on a v quick read) like the source of a bit too much of the (non-critical) shaping of this LRB piece :( :(

New email advert:

Spring is here, but the LRB, like cypress, pine, fir, cedar, spruce, hemlock, juniper, eucalyptus and magnolia trees, is evergreen. Which is to say that pieces and issues from a month, or a year, or a decade ago can be as riveting and unmissable as last week’s. Now you can buy back issues online and test this notion. So if you’ve misplaced an issue you wanted to read the second half of, or your dog or your husband ate pages 17-22 of the last Perry Anderson, or you’ve just realised the collection contained in your brand new LRB binders has got a couple of infuriating gaps, rejoice!

This is the only time I have ever seen the LRB joke about the fact that Perry Anderson writes for it at unusual length.

It was a short article (by LRB standards) and perhaps that's why it flew under the radar, but I'm pretty shocked by Edward Luttwak's thing on Japan.

I do appreciate his stance of trying to go beyond lazy political equivalences with the West, but he treats Japan's disarmament with such contempt - seeing it as purely US imperialism or Japan deciding to be lead as opposed to leading, with no reference to how much it reflected a genuine pacifist feeling amongst the population in the post-war era. He then complains that its critics, who actually belong in three distinct groups - fascists, gangsters, tories - get lumped into the same category (within the context of defending Shinzo Abe); surely in 2019 it's not hard to see how tories strenghten fascists?

He then goes on to chide South Korea for not forgiving Japan "like France forgave Germany". Seems to me you have to apologise before being forgiven - something which Germany, for all its faults, has done quite comprehensively, and something which it has been pointed out again and again Japan has never done. Even pacifist/leftist narratives about the war tend to centre on the lives lost in Japan, not the countries invaded (cf: US movies on Vietnam, natch). Instead he suggests the reason is South Korea wanting to distract from the fact that most people collaborated (as if ppl in France didn't?).

China gets in for similar treatment, with "scaremongering" tactics being used to prevent "mass tourism to Japan", which could interfere with ideological conditioning. Seems a pretty shaky statement to me, considering Chinese tourism around the world, but anyway how can you go into Sino-Japanese relations and not even mention Nanjing?

Like I'm not averse to the idea that South Korea and China might be using anti-Japanese sentiment for their own purposes, but to write an article in a Western paper that doesn't even namecheck the very real historical reasons for these sentiments is pretty galling.

Yeah, the way japanese leaders keep celebrating the lives and graves of horrendous war criminals is pretty orovocative for Koreans, Manchurians, etc.

Just noticed it's the same guy who keeps insisting Reagan would have never pushed the button in the letters section so I guess there's not much to expect.

The Colm Toibin cancer piece is genuinely terrifying and starts with the wonderfully memorable sentence: “It all started with my balls.”

Terrifying indeed, and written beautifully.

For a few days I comforted myself by pretending that, because of my abiding interest in the mysteries and niceties of Being, I had to see an ontologist. Nobody except one of my fellow Irish novelists thought this was funny.

Yeah, I loved that piece. Am planning to ask people if there was a big crowd there whenever they tell me they went to something now.

london review of LOL

Our event with Terry Eagleton on HUMOUR on 10 June is nearly sold out - last few tickets available here: https://t.co/xwReBVT2JC pic.twitter.com/L7YbWi7QqA

— LRB Bookshop (@LRBbookshop) May 19, 2019

Thanks for the link - going to this with my partner now

I also go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1cVl7KHsGA

what's the deal with theory *slapbass flourish*

you-know-who is blogging GoT: i am reaching for a lanchester/lannister joke but luckily someone just rolled me out of the moon door

he has also watched some other TV shows

Do you go to TE's Humour bash Mark S ?

I dug "you know nothing, john lanchester" from a while back

what language is the pinefox now posting in before he reaches for babelfish?

(i'm out of town that day i think, in hastings with my sister)

To be fair, that Lanchester piece seemed fine. I have never seen GoT, so I may well not know what I'm talking about.

Mark S I learned it from my friend R J G

The GOT piece is fine. I liked the "Tony Blair or Ladyhitler" line. But even when he's OTM, he's a bit muddy. It's not so much "John, you took the words out of mouth" as "John, you took the words out of my mouth, added some syllables, and made them a tiny bit less clear"

Crosspost to the a "a box of ___ every month" thread?

www.londonreviewbookbox.co.uk

Letter commissioned for the first issue:

SIR: The London Review doesn’t have, or intend to seek, an Arts Council subsidy. This means that the envious, the indolent, the mischievous must, if they wish to be damaging, take issue with the journal itself, and not with the way it is financed. Most writers believe that they are (or, given the chance, could be) terrific editors, and they are particularly contemptuous of the skills that go into producing journals from which their own works are excluded. Arts Council grants, I’ve come to see, make it all too easy for the whimper of neglect to masquerade as public-spirited dismay. The London Review won’t have to get annoyed about this kind of thing.

It will have other things to get annoyed about, but many of these can be seen as pretty well routine: the publishers will be cagey, the librarians won’t want to know, the backbiters will go on about élitism, metropolitan cliquishness, lack of compassion for the avant-garde, the sycophants will wait and see. The appalling thing about our ‘literary culture’ at the moment is that a large section of its representatives seem to get more of a kick out of seeing things collapse than they do out of seeing them survive. Sooner or later (and I would like to think that this might be the moment) they must ask themselves if they really do want another serious reviewing journal; or if, in their heart of hearts, they prefer to sit around complaining that they haven’t got one.

Ian Hamilton

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v01/n01/letters

they shd commission a letter from ilx for the whateverth issue

Thank you for your service Ian. We're gonna nationalise it now and lock all the white literary London boys now.

Astonishing letters-page controversy:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n03/christopher-norris/paul-de-mans-past

yeah i remember all that de man stuff very clearly :(

Salad days

just finally finished reading empson's seven types of ambiguity properly for the first time (only ever skipped thru bits of it before): not always crystal clear but good not bad

was a bit startled to discover it had an index, something i was convinced i had claimed that it did not here in this very thread: rereading i discover it was the pinefox who said this (his copy had an editor;s note saying not) and that i then posted a link to an on-line version which did

anyway i came to post the following line on proust as i felt it was funny and apposite, only to find i already posted it three years ago lol: "Parodies are appreciative criticisms in this sense, and much of Proust reads like the work of a superb appreciative critic upon a novel which has unfortunately not survived" -- thats right william

(i can only think that three years ago i couldn't locate my physical copy, not at all an unusual situation in my house)

the unsurviving novel is proust

given where the sentence comes in the book it's in, empson is kind of saying "it me, i'm proust"

je suis etc

CALL ME MADELEINE

Some days the novel reads you.