Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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

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

braudel ffs. not braided.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had to check the SFE, which tells us:

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

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

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

"norman" do you see

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

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

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

lol @ subscription theory

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

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

I am an issue behind most of this discussion.

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

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

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

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

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

nyrb has definitely been driven insane by trump

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

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

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

Excellent, nuanced and accurate post from o.nate!

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

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

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

bring back the tiny mummies!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Shippey: highlight so far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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