Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mary k-w ffs

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

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

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

broke: finding copies of INSPIRE in police searches

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

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

"unfounded"

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

Clever wording, cheers.

Though he does have a bit of a point.

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

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

they must have the most dreary christmas drinks get togethers

this small-social-bubble is literally all magazines ever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I finish at last with LRB 3.12.2020.

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

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

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

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

Perry Anderson on Europe Part II.

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

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

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

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

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

I finish LRB 7.1.2021.

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

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

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

Ian Jack on model railways: a touching subject.

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

Will Frears on AFC: dire.

Ian Jack on model railways: a touching subject.

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

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

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

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

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

Hard agree with user Pinefox!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Ambler is the OG genre GG imo

^

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

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