Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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

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

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

nyrb has definitely been driven insane by trump

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

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

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

Excellent, nuanced and accurate post from o.nate!

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

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

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

bring back the tiny mummies!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Shippey: highlight so far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mary k-w ffs

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

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

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

broke: finding copies of INSPIRE in police searches

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

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

"unfounded"

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

Clever wording, cheers.

Though he does have a bit of a point.

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

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

they must have the most dreary christmas drinks get togethers

this small-social-bubble is literally all magazines ever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I finish at last with LRB 3.12.2020.

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

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

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

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

Perry Anderson on Europe Part II.

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

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

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

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

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

I finish LRB 7.1.2021.

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

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

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

Ian Jack on model railways: a touching subject.

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

Will Frears on AFC: dire.

Ian Jack on model railways: a touching subject.

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

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

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

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

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

Hard agree with user Pinefox!