Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

"this word has this particular history which may or may not complicate how this particular person uses it."

This statement is totally empty, after the word "history". And it's not very enlightening up to that word either.

That statement was fine as shorthand. The piece on pronouns from a while back was a great example on just this sort of thing -- people choosing to use words, and choosing not to as well. All of which has social and political repercussions.

Don't think Empson ever pursued his various issues in an essay length piece. Just vague statements. The piece can't help but mirror these.

pursued his issue with derrida? maybe not. here's the LRB piece (by kermode)* i knew the nerrida story from (which hints that WE had at best skimmed one piece by JD):

"Norris knows very well what Empson thought of these precepts and principles. He once sent the great man some essays from the new French school, including Derrida’s famous lecture ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, later treated as a manifesto by his American followers. Empson wrote back to say he found all these papers, including the one by Derrida, or ‘Nerrida’ as he preferred to name him, ‘very disgusting’. Norris, or Dorris, as Empson might have called him in his later career as a theorist, laments, not without reason, that his correspondent showed no signs of having understood what he had found disgusting. On the whole the current tendency is to compare and contrast him not with Derrida but with de Man – Norris spends time on this comparison, and Neil Hertz, in the collection reviewed here, has a whole essay about it. One can only imagine what Empson would have said about that, or what names he would have found for these in so many respects unlikely mates. True, Empson and de Man shared a certain hauteur, and a certain iconoclasm, but the political adhesions were different, and so were the critical dialects, one conscientiously bluff, the other rarefied and prone to gallicism."

the piece can in fact "help but mirror these" -- it could for example express puzzlement at the animus! and openly note that empson never expanded on why he felt this way (ans = he was old and tired and died in 1984 by which time it was too late). i don't quite agree with pinefox that the end part of that statement is "totally" empty, tho it is massively handwavy, because i think (as noted above) that it does effectively exclude the most rigorous form of structuralism (which is that the structures imposed by the form of society can't be sidestepped, so words mean things only because a mass of people accept those meanings, and that individual variance -- which others call "play" -- is impossible). words mean what they mean bcz history, or sometimes just bcz whim! this has non-empty content because it's an element in a pushback (against "bcz history and only"). but it's a pushback against a shadow -- the barthes of s/z, the russian formalists if he considers them relevant (they're not, really, except as dim beasts on the horizon), but otherwise (in lit crit itself) no one -- and no pushback against deconstruction, which is just as anti-totalising as empson was, and similarly (and notoriously) hard to reduce to a motto.

*frank. norris is of course christopher norris. i had forgotten norris argued that de man and empson somewhat overlap. i did re-buy allegories of meaning as i promise so at some point before i am old and tired and dying i may report back…

Yeah his issues with Derrida. For someone who is very combative in print too.

"the piece can in fact "help but mirror these" -- it could for example express puzzlement at the animus! and openly note that empson never expanded on why he felt this way (ans = he was old and tired and died in 1984 by which time it was too late)."

Maybe. Though I think if you start by saying the first bit then I feel you would also need to keep speculating tbh. The bit in brackets would surely be too awkward to state or even hint at. Burrow's alternative is lacking but I like that he had a go at his own answer, from his perspective, as a set of remarks on criticism after Empson's life.

Derrida's generosity was his most vicious trait

Empson very strongly believed in authorial intentions, and that critics should always posit and infer them.

That is probably one of the larger ways in which he differed from much French theory.

ok but he was not implacably hostile e.g. to the freudian claim that unconscious contradictory drives might be impelling the poet's apparent decisions, and the ambiguities that might as a consequence arise and need to be explored: ambiguity not as a consequence of intentional control but the opposite

Lanchester's piece about cheating in sport reads as if it was written for The Guardian. He's got their jokey-blokey columnist style down to a T. Did he always write like this? "It is a truth universally acknowledged that the most important thing ever to have happened is England qualifying for the final of Euro 2020". There's some edgy swearing, an "(only joking!)"; real Zoe Williams-level stuff.

he always writes like this, yes — despite my best efforts i have not yet reached the final pages on whoops! for exactly this exhausting reason

That's a good description, mahb. He is blokeish but I didn't know he was quite that blokeish.

Empson was very given to saying things like "in another part of his mind, I think that Herbert felt this was wrong", or "Donne may have been drawing his hostility to her from ideas that were lying about in his mind".

I suppose, therefore, that he had a very spatial way of talking about the mind, thought and intention, though I can imagine him saying that as far as he can see, there isn't really any other way.

i read the first page of lanchester: if anything it is *worse* than he usually is, bcz he's now porting in helpings of clive james-ish glibness in order basically to say "i've always thought i john lanchester was cleverer than wittgenstein, and having never read wittgenstein except a single quote that clive james was poking smarmy fun in 1985, i shall prove it by doing a wittgenstein on cheating to the amazement of all"

it's maddening: sack him and hire adrian chiles

the examples he chooses are all the most blindingly obvious (Hand of God, again!) and there's a lot of "my friend, a big rugby fan, reckons the following, which conveniently validates the point I am trying to make". Infuriating.

Lol mark

"Maguire… dived like Odette in Swan Lake"

brb my interest in ballet just surged unexpectedly (wtf does this even mean?)

the master of broken simile hand-of-gods his prose over the bar yet again

I couldn't even manage an apathy read of it, let alone a hate read. Abject.

New board description.

(i made it to the end and am now available for comments on who's smarter, wittgenstein or lanchester)

no spoilers please

Young's piece was really good and harrowing. So much of this world to fix.

The checked out Michael Wood on Celan - overall good though a lot of Michael's Wood ticks grate through over-familiarity with his style. Especially his questions with no answer as he chews over a line of poetry.

The Diary section is often something I don't care for at all, though I can't remember why. But I gave the piece on Hong Kong a once over even if I have my reservations on Brit expat commentary on some of these issues. Who is fucked is a question that will take decades to sort out, that's for sure.

I caught up with Penman on The Beatles.

Dire. He should pack it in.

exemplary quote posted here re the nicholas penny review of the rosemary hill book: being a record, week-on-week, of the astounding digressive fragment detail or item which sets each issue of the LRB apart from any other publication, similar or elsewise

i've seen rosemary hill battered a bit on left twitter for something dismissive she said in passing abt some 20th century phenom? and for some reason she tends to get unleashed in the LRB on items pertaining to gossip (so pinefox will likely have formed a poor opinion): but her actual scholarship is imo a different matter, unearthing unexpected popcult dimensions of the late 17th and early 18th century, a period somewhat lost to cliche even in academia

(i shd add i know her a little and like her personally, she was contributing editor at and one of the best things abt a magazine i worked at for many years: shrewd and funny and mischievous)

I don't have any view of ms (or is it Dr? I can't tell) Hill - don't recall any of her work.

I agree that the quotation in your link looks droll.

I find it rather odd that ms or Dr Hill would be battered on Twitter -- that sounds rather cruel, given her vintage compared to them.

Her own site states:
"Born in London, where she now lives, Rosemary Hill went to school in Surrey, to university in Cambridge and again, much later, in London. She was married for twenty-six years to the poet Christopher Logue until his death in 2011. She married the architectural historian Gavin Stamp (1948-2018) in April 2014."

Sadly Mr (or is it Dr?) Stamp died in 2017.

17.6.2021:

I really liked the Adam Mars-Jones review of Francis Spufford's LIGHT PERPETUAL. He quotes passages that make the book sound superbly written; he is very respectful, even as he regretfully takes a distance and says that the book is flawed, mainly by being set at periods of time that are spaced too far apart.

As often, I greatly appreciate AM-J's focus on this kind of 'technical decision' (he's a rare reviewer who talks of fiction in this way) and also the detail of content (here almost self-parodied in his citation of an error he picked up by watching Antiques Roadshow).

The novel sounds appealing in that, unusually, it talks about places where I grew up, viz. SE13, SE18.

Rosemary Hill on Con MPs' wives: utterly dreadful people, shouldn't be covered here.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 24 March 2021 19:23 (four months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Strangely I remember writing something like that but would have thought it was years ago, not 2021.

I do, yes, remember being disgusted by the existence of that review.

I think Tory wives is very much in line with what the LRB does, they definitely review weird/vanity books as gossipy matter into the ruling classes, or just things to be disgusted by.

This review by Jenny Diski of a book on Harold Pinter by his Tory wife was a classic.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n04/jenny-diski/short-cuts

omg

i like and miss jenny diski and no doubt her description of that marriage does indeed reflect fraser's descriptions of it in that memoir -- but tbh it's genuinely a marriage i'd like to know more about, because there's a great deal more to pinter than gets into diski's rather flippant portrait, and fraser, if never a heavyweight, was a competent and respected middlebrow historian (i have a battered copy of her biography of cromwell: it's not christopher hill but it's not useless)

is, in fact, since she's still alive

ann carson uses that biography/memoir extensively in one of her pieces and its very funny

Posting this without having it read it:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/antonia-frasers-must-you-go-review-by-norris-church-mailer

LRB 17.6.2021:

Tessa Hadley on Mary Ellen Meredith (née Peacock?): actually quite engaging. Somehow typical of the LRB to be interested in this stuff.

Niamh Gallagher on Charles Townshend on THE PARTITION of Ireland: a bold, critical review. Gallagher proposes that Townshend posits an ancient tribalism when he should look to historical contingencies. I feel that I'm on her side. Yet it's odd if such a fine historian as Townshend has really been as simplistic and credulous as she implies. His book REBELLION on the Rising is one of the most compelling history books I've ever read. It's odd, more broadly, how historians can still argue about things which are, in a way, in plain sight and well known.

As ever with this material, the fine details start to provide the fascination: the Boundary Commission, the Council of Ireland, the fact that Edward Carson expressed hope for a united Ireland (?!? - he can only have meant a united Ireland under British rule?). At the very last, Gallagher rather over-emphasises Brexit.

Colin Burrow on poet Fiona Benson: blokeish Burrow was not the person to write this, if anyone was.

Having just read BEAR, I much enjoyed the new Patricia Lockwood piece on BEAR

17.6.2021.

William Davies on hospitality: potentially good material on a grim situation, derailed by bringing in Derrida - predictably, the discussion immediately becomes woolly and uninformative.

James Romm on Nero's Rome burning: I hadn't known that Nero was so much accused of starting this fire himself.

Lucie Elven on Eve Babitz: Babitz seems to have belonged to a certain genre of comic style, between Joan Rivers and Joan Didion; or maybe close to Gavin Lambert ... or Renata Adler? A whole generation of those people.

Stuart Jeffries on Adorno and Kracauer: only started this, but must admit, after decades of reading Adorno, I had not known that he was, perhaps, gay.

17.6.2021.

Jeffries seems to me rather downmarket for the LRB, let alone Verso - but I have to hand it to him, that Kracauer review is as good as anyone's would have been. I learned a bit more about Kracauer's longevity as a critic.

Edmund Gordon on Jon McGregor: did he have to make it about himself?

Patrick McGuinness: irritatingly establishes an extreme binary between Oxford University and parts of the city, with tendentious and unreliable claims along the way. As for arriving in Oxford, here said to be awful: I don't often do it but I've always enjoyed it, whether by train or bus.

I open another LRB and start on James Meek on wind turbines. Hats off to him: he continues to investigate material objects and processes that most writers, like me, know nothing about.

15.7.2021.

Yes, credit to Meek - he sees it through and reveals facts. Like another poster or two upthread, I'm not so clear about the conflicts he draws between green and socialist politics. The deeper issue that in this instance he doesn't seem to probe is - how green is this green energy? How much difference are those wind turbines really making?

Sheila Fitzpatrick on perfume: maybe the concept of the book (Chanel No 5 and a Soviet perfume) is actually coherent, but if so, she doesn't make it sound that way. She spends much of the review talking about how different and unrelated the two relevant individuals are. Worse, she goes out of her way to tell us that descriptions of perfume are, to her, 'gobbledygook'. Is this a good thing to say when you've agreed to review a book about ... perfume?

Worse still, she digresses into whatever irrelevant things she can think of, bizarrely trying to fill space - 'and of course there is Proust's madeleine in the related area of taste'. Unbelievable. Possibly even worse is the opening: a whole paragraph about her own memories of various smells, utterly unrelated to the book. It's something of a curse of LRB style, as I just noted above. The book isn't really about you.

Barbara Newman on Dante: this encomium mostly reminded me that I don't like Dante.

Michael Wood on THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD'S WIFE: relatively back on twinkling form, at least a little, after a lot of dreary and earnest reviews.

i realise this is no kind of counter -- especially back in times when being gay was illegal and actively dangerous -- but
(i) adorno's wife gretel was an intellectual of some accomplishment herself (a trained chemist, close to benjamin, thanked in the acknowledgments to the dialectic of enlightenment, as stenographer and sounding board)
(ii) Gretel's wikipedia entry mentions "at least two affairs" during 40+ forty years of marriage biographer stefan müller-doohm (good name) indicates several more -- TWA's affairs and sexual fantasies were written up in his dream-diary and also his letters to his mum (which gretel had very often typed up for him)
(iii) in his useful little book adorno: a guide for the perplexed, sometime ilxor dr alex thomson reminds us that (a) TWA kept toy animals around and above his writing desk (giraffes, a monkey) and that the pet names teddy and gretel had frore one another were "cow" and "hippopotamus"

in conclusion he was clearly (a) bisexual and (b) a furry

Furryism the least of it:

A ceremony in which I had been solemnly installed as head of music in a high school. The repulsive old music teacher, Herr Weber, together with a new music teacher danced in attendance on me. After that, there was a great celebratory ball. I danced with a giant yellowish-brown Great Dane – as a child such a dog had been of great importance in my life. He walked on his hind legs and wore evening dress. I submitted entirely to the dog and, as a man with no gift for dancing, I had the feeling that I was able to dance for the first time in my life, secure and without inhibition. Occasionally, we kissed, the dog and I."

thats right

Gretel Adorno wrote personally to Benjamin in 1934 regarding her "great reservations" towards Brecht's "often palpable lack of clarity"

Look who's talking.

speaking of which: "derailed by bringing in Derrida - predictably, the discussion immediately becomes woolly and uninformative"

i didn't feel this was true, except in the transferred sense of wooliness which derrida is also actually concerned with (and which kant might be imagined to be removing, but instead embeds): that universalised principles of generosity and openness as enacted in the world as it is will produce effects entirely at odds with intentions

the (bad) concrete situation is precisely (i.e. not woollily) an example of the problem as analysed at the general level (there is an elided extra step or two in davies's argument: the central role of kantian injunction in the fashioning of universal principals of right, tho i feel that to dwell on these steps will refocus concerns in the wrong place -- the issue isn't whose thought shd form our basis if not kant's, it's more like how shd we go abt building structures of social order out of principles of good when philosophy will always take into topsyturvy zones

LRB 15.7.2021.

Ange Mlinko on Adrienne Rich: informative, readable, critical - perhaps the best thing I can recall reading from this reviewer. I would never have known that Rich was originally a conventional 'Harvard wife' of the 1950s. I didn't know how ill she was, either. Living to 82 with that condition may be an achievement. Mlinko convincingly, and sceptically, shows in the first column how many of Rich's lines seem current now.

Niela Orr on Lauren Oyler's novel: the novel sounds dreadful. The review does well to hint at this, and take a distance from it - Orr seems smart enough to see how bad the material is and why. But I feel nonetheless that the fact that Oyler has written for the LRB, knows people who know Orr, or whatever, leads to too much soft-pedalling.

Joanna Biggs on Natasha Brown: dreadful review of a novel that again sounds dreadful. The review is bad in various ways, but some of what's quoted from the novel sounds like 6th-form material.

These two reviews together make me worry about the new (?) generation of writers, or just the quality of the LRB itself nowadays.

Not directly relevant, since most LRB reviewers seem to be academics of one kind or another, but this editorial from the new nplusone mag touches on some of these issues:

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-40/the-intellectual-situation/critical-attrition/

The main problem with the book review today is not that its practitioners live in New York, as some contend. It is not that the critics are in cahoots with the authors under review, embroiled in a shadow economy of social obligation and quid pro quo favor trading. The problem is not that book reviews are too mean or too nice, too long or too short, though they may be those things, too. The main problem is that the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine, hopefully with better lighting and tools, but at the very least with better pay. What kind of job or opportunity for the reviewer depends on her ambitions.

as someone insanely on-line myself i have a vague plan to read a big bunch of the recent "very online" fiction (starting with early outrider natasha stagg) bcz given the splay of responses i slightly wonder if there's a category error being enacted (by the authors? by the reviewers?)

let's make a list of fiction that's "about" life online and then not poll it bcz polls are for babies and also they suck

I also just happened to be sent that link that Piedie Gimbel posts. I'm afraid I'm finding this n+1 tone unbearable, and very much of a piece with Oyler and the people who write about her. I couldn't believe how that n+1 article went on and on.

These people are incredible whingers who are obsessed with writing at massive length, in sarcastic world-weary tones, about how they hate Twitter and are always on Twitter. It all seems worse in the US than UK, fwiw.

Quite right, they should bang on about how bad most of the reviews are in the LRB, but how they keep reading the LRB, instead. Priorities people!

O'Hagan and Lanchester's continued existence is a far, far bigger problem for the LRB than Oyler, who did lots of work to write around the US ecosystem for the likes of Baffler to then end-up as an LRB regular, and who got things ultimately right about the likes of Tolentino. That she might not write a great novel is just the way it is.

that n+1 piece is excruciating