Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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

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

I will just propose:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barbara Newman on Medieval arts of dying: quite good.

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

None of these was more interesting than the flawed Lockwood.

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

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

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

belated editorial rapprochement i mean

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

cum town?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(suspect they also believe this applies to lanchester tho)

response to plax: it was indeed an unwholesome suggestion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will he be attacked for this? Probably not much.

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

Looking forward to this.

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

— James B (@piercepenniless) November 25, 2020

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

The Patricia Lockwood election response article is good!

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

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

braudel ffs. not braided.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had to check the SFE, which tells us:

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

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