Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

I have owned that edition for decades. Amazed to learn that Deighton drew the picture!

via digression into the entire cockburn family and even orwell lol this is my ilx commentary on or around ambler

also you can find user aimless serially missing all the points abt him if you use the search function precisely enough

"Randall Kennedy on the Supreme Court: now this is much better, the real deal. Factual, clear, unflinching, with no faff about figures of speech or personal anecdotes. Just straight ahead through the salient realities and the arguments, with a cold-eyed conclusion from a progressive standpoint."

Sounds like Perry Anderson on the EU.

never ever listen to any lrb podcasts ever. it’s like pinefox’s observer editorial comment enacted x1000.

lol

Randall Kennedy on the Supreme Court

Aw, fuck, now the LRB is turning into the NYRB.

this piece on Mary Kay-Wilmers retiring contains two interesting quotes:

“Newspapers say the same thing over and over again and we’re all horrified and collectively up in arms and there’s normally more than one side to something,” she told the Observer in 2014. “So if you hear somebody saying something coherent and intelligent that’s not totally out of order, it’s interesting to read it.”

what happens if it's coherent and intelligent and out of order? I would think that is more interesting to read.

Last year, she explained that the LRB had endured “because we have a sense of humour that you can see without it necessarily being declared. We’re not po-faced, as it were.”

lol rite.

also, consulting editor, who was the editor, senior editor and deputy editor taking over - someone who knows about editor roles tell me whether this is a recipe for disaster? My only analogy is management where having someone who used to be in charge still with an ability to make their opinion felt, and two people in authority feels very very bad.

Those quotations from her seem broadly accurate. You don't agree?

'out of order' seems a floating phrase here - if something is coherent and intelligent, then it is already in order? Maybe what she meant by 'out of order' was contrarian / offensive, in a way that maybe the SPECTATOR is.

I don't think the LRB suffers from lack of humour. Maybe even too much of the wrong kind - as in the indulgence of Bennett but also the blokeishness of Burrow.

I don't know much about McNicol. I think I once met Spawls, at an LRB event. Does she go on as much as Friedell does about how ex-boyfriends are awful, Jane Austen is great for breaking up with awful ex-bfs, etc? That's a tiresome motif.

if “not totally out of order” isn’t an additional qualification what’s it doing there? it feels like a v constraining - “intellectually v sound and well written of course but simply beyond the pale, couldn’t possibly publish”.

and yes i think that the lrb can be incredibly po faced - certainly many of its core writers - (some of their sillinesses might be more easily exposed if they weren’t so sonorous) but this is an area in which we differ, which is part of an ongoing conversation, i feel! (and i still mean to go back to the lockwood with your critique in mind pf)

i mean that “not totally out of order” might just be a way of defining editorial voice, which ofc is necessary, but it leaves questions begging and also seems like not a good way of defining editorial voice!

I agree that 'out of order' confuses her point. It does seem like she's saying 'some things I wouldn't want to publish because I don't agree with them'. Which I suppose I can go along with.

What's an example of LRB writers being too solemn? I don't see it.

Here are some LRB writers who are in different ways comic, dry or ironic: O'Hagan, Lorentzen, Hofmann, Eagleton, Lockwood, Michael Wood, Burrow, Perry, Collini, Runciman, Mount, Mars-Jones. James Wood has a kind of sense of humour but can certainly come closer to solemnity (but less so now). Perry Anderson is, in a way, the least comic but even he has his own kind of sarcasm.

I don't like all those writers much but I don't think excess of seriousness is their problem.

FWIW I would suggest that if you think the LRB is an insular club (something many of us have felt at various times), then humour would tend to reinforce this, and flat seriousness would be the best way to cut through it.

It occurs to me that when he started out in about 1990, James Wood's high seriousness had such a rhetorical function: he was puritanically aloof from backslapping, logrolling UK literary culture.

the humour is a good point. immediately and without much reflection i would say there’s a silly and not at all funny sort of “tittering” literary humour that you notice most in the lrb podcasts, but which i think is present in the writing.

if you’re going to tell me that runciman isn’t unbearably solemn then we may differ on our basics. i would perhaps say that there is a rough space where i would put solemn, self-satisfied, pompous, self-regarding, which i would tend to put along with lacking in humour and that i think lanchester, for all his occasional tone of cumbersome levity, and a fortiori runciman exemplify this.

Fizzles, everything you're saying, to me, confirms the idea that there is *too much* humour, not too little.

The fact that these podcast people josh along chuckling together can't be a sign that the LRB is too solemn, can it?

Runciman unbearably solemn? I find that description incomprehensible. If anything I think he's too blokeish and informal.

Lanchester, again, clearly isn't solemn. He's very similar: blokeish, joshing, ironising - but not actually funny.

To understand what we're describing, we need to be able to posit what the alternative to this mode would look like. I think, again, that Perry Anderson is a relatively good example of the alternative: someone who IS almost always serious, and NEVER indulges the blokeishness.

In fact the NLR would be a much, much better example of a journal that IS solemn. To 99% of people it would be less entertaining than the LRB, though I can still find it entertaining at times.

Guess Mary-Kay Williams going explains why they've hired more women to write for it over the last couple of years.

i still need to write my "defence of bennett" i think (but not today as i am super busy w/non-writing stuff)

busy writing things like tolk = "2horny4elfs"

^^^the wit the lrb needs i feel we can all agree

Runciman unbearably solemn? I find that description incomprehensible. If anything I think he's too blokeish and informal.

so, i think the issue here is that these overlap for me. in that blokeishness = a self-serious male tone, incredibly pompous, which precludes the vulnerability from which self mocking and humour (and i mean humour as separate from self-mocking - allowing the subject and your approach to it to allow itself to be made fun of) can emerge.

but this i think is giving it all more analysis than it deserves, and we'd need to do some work on a shared framework to make any headway, though as discussed before there is a wider discussion to which it contributes.

i quite like the bennett yearly diary. probably for all the reasons i'm supposed to like it, gossipy parochial observation of the world with the background of bennett's experiences and history in letters and the arts and what i'll loosely call english society with a medium sized s. like the author it's become more frail over time, and that was particularly noticeable this time around, but i don't mind it particularly.

"in letters and the arts" -- including in particular the camp* green-room bitchiness of theatre-style gossip

*AB's relationship to camp is complex and somewhat reserved tho: i feel that he finds full-on high camp a bit tiresome and vulgar

Lost in all this again, but wondering why it's the Russians wot done it is a discussion of social media is nec. to be dismissed, thinking of Mueller and other US Gov reports, also why is favorable mention of Hofstader grounds for dismissal (not saying it's not, been a long time since I've read him)??

*in* a discussion of social media

Your favourite LRB writer Patricia Lockwood with main literary feature in the Guardian this weekend.

Unfortunately it's written by bilious reactionary Hadley Freeman.

I'd like to say that if I were in PL's position I'd refuse to be interviewed by HF, but I'm sure you don't get to make such choices.

yes i saw that. hadley freeman also covering herself in glory lashing out at the excellent women’s and gender diverse bookshop the second shelf is good timing as well. not sure how much of a choice you get but ew, do not want to read anything by hadley freeman even if it’s about My Favoruite LRB HERO Patricia Lockwood She Can Do No Wrong. (i haven’t read priest daddy and have no particular urge to - should i?)

I did read that a couple of days ago. HF was totally the wrong person. Not only bcz bigotry, but also she is the wrong person to talk to Lockwood about shitposting.

as i defended a runciman piece upthread i’m checking in to say uncharitably that mournful personal connection or no i don’t know where uk crits got the idea there is some kind of bottomless global appetite for larkin/kingsley anecdotage. it has to stop. however

Even now I shudder and moan involuntarily. M says: “Is it death again, or Mrs Thatcher?”

this is, eerily, exactly what i said when i saw the headline

(it was both, but mostly death)

The Lydia Davis "piece" in the last issue I received is abysmal toss:

Alarmed to see Lydia Davis has reached the Updike state of publishing any half-arsed thing she can think of (and is being abetted in this by editors and publishers). The rest of us do this sort of thing on twitter for free. pic.twitter.com/2JcQSz8DMX

— Caustic Cover Critic 📚 (@Unwise_Trousers) January 29, 2021

I concur.

i mean two of the many great things abt twitter are
A: that it delivers the not-even-half-assed in too-cheap-to-meter quantities (so we resent feeling we're paying for it from bluechecks)
B: some account choosing to call themselves like @posada_spunkah_666 is funnier and more pertinent for free than all the ppl hired by the grownup papers combined

Through twitter you see both i) what a waste of energy work is, we could all be doing something that's actual fun instead of paying rent. And ii) that despite this, we can still have fun.

my current project is to get across how corrosive the entire concept of writing for money is in general, while also getting paid to explore this

😃

Colm Toibin on Pope Francis: a) better than most Toibin, especially as he could report on events he'd attended in the 1980s; b) oddly inconclusive, in a typical Toibin / LRB way; c) ultimately seemed quite sceptical / critical towards the Pope -- whom even I tend to like.

My unasked for and banal opinion on Pope Francis- I like that he at least attempts to be a force for good more than malevolent reaction and obscurantism, it feels like a huge improvement on his predecessors. But on the other hand, he's the Pope lol

I'm enjoying that Toibin piece; I don't think his support for totalitarian regimes and the context in which his read-as-anti-homophobic statements were said are very well known.

John Lanchester talks to Patricia Lockwood about her new novel, No One is Talking About This (Bloomsbury)

is it your birthday soon, pinefox?

contributing ed and nethead, John Lanchester.

oh no

net buff

tear him, mark.

i got absolutely neathed at glastonbury in 2013 iirc

I don't know much about LRB contributor Lauren Oyler, but / and was surprised to read in the New Statesman that she has previously written scathingly about Patricia Lockwood. I would have guessed that they were quite similar. This review of Oyler's book made it sound bad, anyway. It was confusing as it sounded as though Oyler was bad in the way she criticised other people for being bad; as though she couldn't recognise the same tendencies in herself.

Those two books -- Oyler and Lockwood -- are being reviewed alongside one another, with Lockwood being preferred.

My Pope Francis opinion: he is good on twitter.

Oyler wrote a very negative review of Jia Tolentino's book which I thought was very poorly done (I haven't read Tolentino's book and have no opinion about it, I just found Oyler's review completely unconvincing!)

that review was...a thing. Oyler strikes me as v smart but the review got weirdly personal. I like Tolentino’s book, but it’s certainly not above criticism, but I found that review hard to follow at times. Her novel sounds sort of unpleasant to read to me!

That review was v mean girls

I really liked the latest diary - abolish the police, except replace 'the police' with 'schools':

It seemed obvious to me that despite what everyone said, schools were not primarily about education. Formal learning made up a minimal fraction of the activity there (and the part adults later find the least memorable). The real purpose and priority of the school system was to instil the habit of obedience, of deference to our superiors. Learning was to be discouraged if it interfered with this end.

LRB 4.2.2021:

William Davies on Brexitland: some insight into social identities.

Mike Jay on CIA / LSD: this feels like a zany Pynchonian story that comes up repeatedly.

Peter Geoghegan on FOI: useful and well done.

Namara Smith on Yaa Gyasi: this novel sounds bad.

Alex Harvey on Denis Johnson: this sounds pretty poor too - sort of cult of Bukowski stuff.

Thomas Meaney on Castro in Harlem: much better and more interesting.

Freya Johnston on Wollstonecraft: brings out her individuality, but puzzling to end it with such swingeing attacks on feminism now.

Nicholas Spice on Hans Keller: a few good details and brings back some Third Programme / Radio 3 culture.

David Runciman on Larkin: I think better of this than others - because ultimately it's a quiet tribute to DR's father, W.G. Runciman, and that last column or so is decently done.

Samuel Earle on Carrere: sounds an odd writer.

Marina Warner on saints and angels: it's funny how typecast MW is, how she has spent decades reviewing things about fairy tales and saints, and she's still happily doing it and telling us that in lockdown, we need fairy tales more than ever. She's as solid and repetitive as an Alan Shearer or Leon Osman.

LRB 18.2.2021:

Thomas Powers on Robert Stone: it's embarrassing in a way what an old-school all-American male Thomas Powers seems to be. He writes about men having instincts like wolves. He talks some nonense in this review, in his resonant rhetorical way so it will go unquestioned. One of the worst things he does is, again to an embarrassing degree, repeat, as if it's a new idea, the very discredited idea that 'the Vietnam war was really about the effect it had on America' (not the Vietnamese). People were criticizing Vietnam films for saying this 40 years ago!!

Tony Wood on Russia: good to see him being pretty uncompromising on corruption and not over-complicating it.

Andy Beckett on LA in the 1960s: sound. Great Elvis anecdote.

Most of the rest doesn't appeal, but I will keep going.