Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

Jean Stafford -- ILB's favourite!

now finished the (very long) em dickinson piece: in conclusion, ok perhaps she was "selfish, nasty and emotionally impaired" but most of the (more gregarious) ppl round her were much worse! shutting yrself away from all of amherst -- "elfing it" -- seems like the correct response in context!

i enjoyed this piece bcz i am a gossip and a featherbrained PoS, it made me like and recognise ED as a fellow modern (i mean i am not a shut-in and i am nice but i am also not a sentimentalist) -- i also liked the read that her religiosity is a long high-school project of badmouthing god (by passing weird mean messages around class)

The review also makes him sound awful in numerous ways, again and again. Most seriously, perhaps, it makes light of his promiscuity.

The listing of women he supported and helped along in his life was such a "some of my best friends" moment.

i think i have explained my dislike of wolcott? i find his "style" a try-hard glibly full-of-itself and aggravating version of an approach i enjoy in others -- there probably isn't really much more to it than that in the end.* jw plainly loves roth's fiction (as did many of a particular era) and knows it well (fair enough) and finds it hard to step back to explore how someone once considered daring truthful and liberating might have become trapped squeezed and devalued in the tectonic shifts in sexual mores since then (possibly bcz his own shaping values wd get a bit of a squeezing in the process)? there's a story here but he talks all round it without at all confronting it?

(tldr the mid-60s are a very long way away now -- some of the ways we left them behind were the wrong ways after all)

*(thinking a bit harder: jw's a former rockwriter who gained a grown-up platform -- at lol vanity fair -- by "growing up", e.g. asset-striping some of rockwrite's flippant energies while patronisingly mocking some of its simplicities? but tbh this is me projecting back, i don't have the week-on-week receipts, except for my allergy to his "style")

Rosa Lyster: informative on Egypt-Ethopia relations as determined by water.

I found this fascinating (headline stats: 95% of Egypt's water comes from the Nile, at least 80% of which originates in Ethiopia); also informative (and depressing) about the current political situation in Egypt - dictatorial, dysfunctional, corrupt, inhumane and repressive.

I didn't know that Wolcott had actually been a rock writer! He seems much too immersed in the literary scene (ie: talking ironically about Mailer's feuds, while not having anything more interesting to talk about than Mailer's feuds) for that.

Oh yeah, he wrote the Creem review, the lead in that issue, I think, of Another Green World and Discreet Music: really different for Creem, and for him (also wrote for the Voice during peak of the CBGB 70s, though I didn't think of him as being one of the Noise Boys, who were mainly Bangs-Meltzer-Tosches). Several of my friends ran out and bought those after reading that, to an extent that surprised me (I listened to their copies).
There was an in-depth, but not wallowing like O'Leary in the more lurid-to-ludicrous sexcapade details, piece on Roth and his ways in The New Yorker recently, tied in with an apparently pretty well-balanced new bio. He could be generous, yes, to men as well as women, but either way, relationships could go really wrong, or, in the case of women, be pretty twisted from the beginning. Things could get pretty wild, and his friends barely dissuaded him from publishing some shit that would have made it even worse, in several ways. That's really all I care to know about his life, so better not read several of the novels, if I ever start back (got off the bus after Portnoy's Complaint).
I give him credit for retiring, when he realized he'd said it all/run out of ideas, as he announced at the time. The NY article indicated that he'd seen some of this friends, like Bellow, go on too long. A lot of people do.

The LRB review states that he announced his retirement after a very serious health problem which seems to have meant that it would be safer not to go on writing.

iirc wolcott himself came up with the term the "noise boys" (of bangs-meltzer-tosches): maybe it's now also applied to him but he's a very difft kind of writer

his "immersion" in the lit scene comes across -- to me, bitter, judgmental -- as constantly yelling "look! i read books as well!"

He also published at least one novel...pinefox, I've seen a direct quote, somewhere, about realizing he had nothing more to say, but maybe he was putting a spin on it, or maybe it was impetus and the body giving out simultaneously( also, a review of the recent bio referred briefly to dementia).

(I know "impetus" usually is of the body, but I meant like impelled, compelled, highly motivated, not wanting say "inspiration.")

From the review of Rachel Cusk's latest novel:

We learn that he is probably a man, and certainly a poet.

A case for singular 'they'.

i loved the dickinson piece and it made me reread my emily dickinson by susan howe and while doing so i noticed that the lrb article uses many of the same quotes as the intro (including the same denise levertov quote with the same cutoff points) by eliot weinberger (neither this nor howe are mentioned in the article)

Lunchtime Euros

Throughout Euro 2020, we’ll be hosting short online conversations about one of the day’s (or the previous day’s, or the next day’s) matches. Kicking off at 1 p.m., expect a bit of history, geopolitics, literature, but mostly just football.

Monday 14 June: Sunder Katwala and Jude Wanga on England vs. Croatia

Wednesday 16 June: Misha Glenny and Peter Pomerantsev on Ukraine v. North Macedonia

Friday 18 June: Val McDermid and Helen Thompson on England v. Scotland

Tuesday 22 June: Sukhdev Sandhu and George Szirtes on Germany v. Hungary

Tuesday 29 June: Peter Geoghegan and John Lanchester on the Last 16

Plus: A conversation about the later stages still to be announced!

Somehow I don't think this will be good.

Perry A Vs Mark S for the final please.

George Szirtes is very very good but fuck listening to anything about football

Jude Wanga should be good on Eng Croatia, she wrote a really good thing on racism and football.

i wd totally own him (perry) by the technique of emojis and internet acronyms and short cheeky replies

going through that Emily Dickinson article and she pickled kittens?? not living ones I hope

How will you produce emoji in spoken form?

with serene charm

Ian Penman on The Meatles

meanwhile i continue to trudge my way thru this thomas nagel essay on consqeuentialism, deontology and moral intituition -- not bcz i am lloving it but bcz i want to get a renewed bead on a discursive praxis i enaged with and revolted against as a student back when dinosaurs were gazing haplessly at the incoming asteroid. nagel i know is a BIG NAME CHAP in such waters (philosophy of mind, wikipedia tells me; indeed he already was in the 1980s and i feel i was given essays of his to read back then) and i can appreciate the painstaking step-by-step clarity of the type of thought he is taking us through

but i also -- just as strongly as back then but i feel with more lived justification lol -- very much think "what use is this?" assume that clarification is reached and something is learned (assume i merely finish reading this piece) that gets done what what i've learned? at issue -- in some sense -- is the ok-ness or otherwise of e.g. lying, torture and so on (lying appears in his opening gambit, torture has been mentioned in passing a couple of times).

right, so both are evidently routine things in the world: assume we wish to change this, and assume we wish both happened less often. and assume some moral facts about this get established by nagel and chums in discussion. the gap between the world where these facts are established and the world where such changes are effected seems -- to me -- to be if not unbridgeable, then at the very least so vast that just a fvckton of other things are going to be relevant to any project of change (which will derive -- in either direction actually) from the struggles of people in pursuit of their interests (group x want to tortuure more ppl; group y want not be tortured so much)

anyway i guess this post is my clumsy pardody of this way of thinking and approaching the world, and its relative exhausting and irritating unreadableness and irrelevance is a mark of how weird and useless i feel that i find it all

more when i reach the end of the piece i guess

nagel for example respects the conventions of spelling punctuation and grammar, in this essay^^^ i say no to all three

I have known people who talked as though you needed the correct 'philosophy' to act in the correct way politically.

I have always thought this was misguided.

Making the same point from a different angle, I don't entirely see that political action need be the end result or objective in a discussion of consequentialism, deontology and moral intuition - sorting these things out can be its own reward, in the same way that, say, aesthetic enjoyment doesn't have to be determined by its political efficiency.

Got very little out of that particular essay tho, and the soviet/nazi equivalence immediatley made me wary.

Spoilers: Nagel isn't going to pull any moral facts out of the bag. He does sketch an example where the right philosophical basis might produce a beneficial political outcome but yeah it's pretty thin gruel, philosophy is a fun game to play if you like that kind of thing but a) as mark suggests it's not exactly in a position to change the world and ii) even if all politicians were giants of moral reasoning, reason is still the slave of the passions and 'tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

even if all politicians were giants of moral reasoning, reason is still the slave of the passions and 'tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger

Somewhat skeptical of the idea that moral philosophy needs to value reason over "the passions", think you'll find wildly differing povs on that within the discipline.

of course, there are wildly differing povs on everything in philosophy! i don't know if i'm valuing reason over 'the passions', the idea is that passions (or values) - some of them anyway - are immune to reasoning.

maybe this should go in the philosophy thread

Making the same point from a different angle, I don't entirely see that political action need be the end result or objective in a discussion of consequentialism, deontology and moral intuition - sorting these things out can be its own reward, in the same way that, say, aesthetic enjoyment doesn't have to be determined by its political efficiency.

Well said!

In the latest issue I enjoyed a review on histories of 'female husbands'.Trans histories from the 19th century and it's positioning to today's discourses on gender politics. Really informative and interesting.

Less enjoyable was the article on Kracauer. I usually can read a lot of film reviews but he doesn't sound like something I'd enjoy though maybe it's the writer of the piece. It was really laughable how dismissive he was of Pauline Kael's review of one of his books. The quote he pulled was the best bit of writing in the whole piece! So his dismissal of her was weak. Stuart Jeffries wrote a book on The Frankfurt School so it's clearly a career.

i fear i greatly enjoyed that --besides the frankfurt school book -- jeffries is best known for a book called "mrs slocumbe's pussy": suck on that ted

the krakauer crit collection i read many years back is not terrible but kael is basically right, yes

completed the nagel and tbh very unimpressed: the dominant mode is passive voice non-citation ("[such-and-such] is widely considered a kind of moral evolution"), with no attempt to locate who exactly it is that's doing the considering (or even who "in general"); this extended to distinct obfuscatory vagueness when it comes to the "evolution" of (as an example to allow a move towards generalisation which is of course anything but) "property rights"; handwaving away *all* actual political history ancient and recent of the imposition and any fight-back against individual property rights ; the assumption of as establishment of the "correct kind of thinking" as what? a final-resort priestcraft so set apart from any distorting material interest that their analysis functions as a deeper and wiser exploration of such questions?

daniel and pinefox high-fived on this:

I don't entirely see that political action need be the end result or objective in a discussion of consequentialism, deontology and moral intuition - sorting these things out can be its own reward, in the same way that, say, aesthetic enjoyment doesn't have to be determined by its political efficiency

my argument i suppose is that what's going on is that this "sorting out" (for its own reward) is in effect the shifting of an active and very real political interest into the shadows, as if it's off the table and playing no role in the disntinctions and weightings when it really really really isnt?

to return it to just one live and a concrete issue (where there has been "evolution" and yet not at all enough evolution): can people be property? i'm guessing nagel would assert -- or anyway accept -- that the answer toda is "widely considered" to be no.

but in practice ppl were property were, and not so long ago: what is the "property rights" solution or resolution or restitution? as a matter of historical fact, the state of haiti was still playing france a vast compensation debt for the freeing of the slaves in 1804 until 1947. reason: the loss of "poperty" had to be paid for. but if france never had the right to treat ppl as property, hasn't the debt always run the other way? the former slaves are owed restitution fo the loss of themselves as their own property? (the idea that every indivudal "owns themself" being the somewhat perverse-sounding kludge in property-rights langage to deal with the edge case that was also a world-historically dominant case, viz the existence of the slave trade blah blah)

to me it feels like every single sentence of nagel's essay is contorted into the way of speaking that he nagel opts for so as to occlude this large shaping fact in any arguments about the evolution of the property right as a modern moral fact ("fact"), to prevent it from even slightly grazing your (or indeed his) attention (even when he mentions john locke lol: viz a key philosopher in the western canon who explicitly addressed slavery and explicitly came down on the side now "widely considered" incorrect)

tldr: i have no idea where this this longwinded explication of a minor wobble in the relative fashionabilities of deontology and consequentialism over [unspecificied recent period] is intended to take us, if not towards similar erasures of history

adding: yes of course the specific slice of history i've opted to grab at will be contested! that's what history is for! isn't it also what "moral philosophy" and "philosophy of mind" are for? apparently not in nagel's hands :(

Penman on The Beatles was reliably readable and off though I got the feeling he was better off covering Eve Babitz (though Lucie Elven was excellent on it) in the same issue.

I think the comparison with The Stones didn't fit because Elvis is there, in terms of reach/impact, "shifting the earth off its axis" as well (though that's just me going "kill the Rolling Stones" again). Yoko is someone I'd rather read a whole piece on tbh. The bit on her felt tacked on and unsatisfying and I don't think it's enough to acknowledge that she was badly treated because of sexism and racism. Watered down was a low.

xp

i literally pitched them a big yoko piece before xmas and got back a (very nice) rejection letter saying "looks good but no can do we have some stuff on the way that will likely overlap a bit too much" >:(

:-(

I hope you can get it published somewhere else.

This hardly overlaps, there is something that will have a chunky mention of Adorno or Benjamin every few months.

yes i must try and re-pitch it somewhere (and aim high)

Maybe some of those sites that seem to specialize in "longreads," like---I don't know much about them, but---4Columns, or Medium, which recently fired its staff writers and supposedly will depend on readers' submissions (although I also read that the publisher changes his mind a lot)

i'm mostly a tariq ali sceptic when it comes to his head-on politics but his side-piece interests are often useful and engaging: anyway i enjoyed his review of the new edition of maxime rodinson's 1961 life of mohammad, even if rerally all it boils down to is a handful of not-entirely linked items he's been burning to slip into some semi-relevant piece for ages

(the section on don quixote is the most suggestive, if also the most incomplete: that an underlying and overlooked theme in cervantes book is the expulision of the jews and the moors from spain, considered by some -- TA doesn't even advert to this -- the founding moment of the west's turn towards blood-based racial category in re social structure)

(lol that TA instead takes a moment to digress into a scholar-slapping of one of harold bloom's terrible intros to an item from the "western canon" -- i love early bloom and even mid and very weird bloom, viz the book on angels, but late and comfy bloom is indeed lazy and dreadful)

basically it was "notes towards something i, tariq ali, will never complete" (and if i did the head-on politics wd swamp the more fascinating stuff)

move that " to the end for the true sense of this^^^ post to reveal itself

Yeah I found the section on Quixote in that review really great but it then descended into fragmented commentaries.

Also noted 3x reviews from the NYRB classics publisher in the same issue.

LRB 20.5.2021: I must admit that I wearied of this issue and left some things unread. I'll give it away without really attempting them.

Of those I actually attempted:

Nicholas Penny on stone was too dense and specialised for me to follow.

Peter Perdue on China, I rather skipped through.

Duncan Campbell on the decline of courts and court reporting: better, compact, informative, poignant.

Keith Thomas on Enlightenment: rather standard, but informative.

Michael Wood on NOMADLAND: brief.

Lauren Oyler: I saw that this contained a bit of flawed writing that an editor could have improved. Otherwise I found the article hard to follow and gave up.

Emma Hogan on modernist lesbians: much better, giving us a lot of facts. The challenges to the author's view are left to the end and very brief; I'd like to hear more on them.

Susannah Clapp on bags: bad.

August Kleinzahler on Robert Creeley's letters: seems to repeat a pattern in which these celebrated poets are tiresome, offensive, drunken boors. Dreadful - what's good is that the article doesn't gloss this, is critical of Creeley, says that the letters are bad and dull. That's refreshing.

Timothy Brennan's letters-page riposte to his reviewer, on Said, is as interesting as anything else in the issue.

But maybe I'm becoming a poor reader of the LRB.

LRB 3.6.2021.

Thomas Nagel on morality: now I've actually read this, I have to agree with Mark S that it says very little. It's not that I want it to give me political positions, but I'd like it to say *something*!

3 current political articles in a row: all basically quite good.

Chris Lintott on ETs and SETI: good.

Now on the vast Joanne O'Leary Emily Dickinson. She seems to get more extensive and frequent LRB coverage than comparable figures.

"i have no idea where this this longwinded explication of a minor wobble in the relative fashionabilities of deontology and consequentialism over [unspecificied recent period] is intended to take us"

well said by Mark S.

I read it as basically a summary of the current state of a well-known debate in the Anglophonic philosophical tradition and a defense of the deontological side against certain consequentialist arguments. I think the intention is to convince the reader of the merit of the deontological side. I can understand if one finds this a waste of time, but at least you can't fault Nagel for not giving fair warning. He lays out his intentions at the beginning of the piece: "I will proceed on the assumption that it makes sense to try to discover what is really right and wrong, and that moral intuitions provide prima facie evidence in this inquiry." If that sounds corny or old-fashioned to you, or hopelessly naive, then you probably won't like the rest of the piece!

can't say i'm particularly thrilled to have the moral intuitions of philosophy professors offered as prima facie evidence for anything

Then don't read the piece!