Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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

i agree that being a critic sucks but pls don't dramatize literally every detail of it

"the likes of Tolentino" -- not sure i know what this means and nor do you

"the likes of" is a phrase that shd always be struck out

sorry if this offends, do the brainwork plz

No brain me work

The n+1 piece makes some good points but it's way too long. Maybe there was some self-awareness in these lines:

After so much reading, research, and annotation, the freelance critic has a lot to say — too much to fit into a six-hundred-word review or a five-thousand-word review essay. So begins the painful work of cutting and condensing, until she’s left with only a few choice quotes and a paragraph or two of analysis; the rest is backstory. But say that isn’t her problem — say she’s given all the space she wants, for an online magazine that has no word limit and pays a flat rate. Bliss, no? No. Pressure still stalks her. No word limit means no excuses: the potentially bottomless page will only make it clearer if she doesn’t have anything to say.

Yes, very well said by both o.nate and Brad Nelson.

current issue:

— the neal ascherson piece on culloden is good (solid summary of the issues facts and implicatitions round a very specific event including some good LRB-style quirky oddities)`
— the piece on the late roman writer scholar and politician cassiodorus manages to cut thru the obscurity of the history of that date -- the first gothic lords of rome in conflict with the byzantiuum-based emperors -- to make some nice points abt histioriography (i have a weird affection for this era bcz it's also one of the few stretches of history i learnt abt in school… for some reason in my specific stream i ended up doing very little history, and mainly remember my teacher spending one lesson reading from a novel by denis wheatley of all ppl, possibly something extremely disobliging abt catherine the great) (the other stretch of history i was taught was the formation of the russian empire)
— the andrew o'hagan piece on the books by megan and fergie is exorbitantly bad enough that i might send in a letter abt it lol

lol this is the denis wheatley book in question (there are 12 roger brookl books)

The Shadow of Tyburn Tree tells the story of Roger Brook – Prime Minister Pitt's most resourceful secret agent – who, in 1788, is sent on a secret mission to the Russia of that beautiful and licentious woman Catherine the Great. Chosen by her to become her lover, Roger is compelled to move with the utmost care, for if it was known that not only was he spying for two countries but also having an affair with the sadistic and vicious Natalia, he would meet certain death. The story moves to Denmark and the tragedy of Queen Matilda, to Sweden and the amazing ride of King Gustavus to save Gothenborg, and finally back to England where Roger returns to the arms of his one great love, Georgina.

^ that blurb indicates the book seems to be disappointingly lacking in satanic cults

the andrew o'hagan piece on the books by megan and fergie is exorbitantly bad enough that i might send in a letter abt it

This does sound a bad prospect.

I know it's a case of battering an exhausted mule, but that now much-discussed n+1 article 'critical attrition' nags at me, beyond agreement with o.nate and Brad Nelson on it, such that I wish to note why it seems somewhat mistaken.

Its premise is that:

What effect does this have on her reviews that make their way to our reader? Put simply, they are not written for him. He may learn a thing or two — glean an insight, absorb an opinion, and draw some conclusion about what he needs to read and what he can get away with pretending to have read. But should he get a niggling sense somewhere in the back of his head that the critic isn’t thinking of him — of the earnest reader, and the limited time and money he has for literature — he will be right. She isn’t thinking of him at all.

This sounds authoritative. But it actually raises questions like:
- how would we know if a review was 'written for the reader'? Would it show in the text or is it an inscrutable psychological fact about the reviewer?
- what if a reader (like me) does in fact lots of current reviews relatively accessible and informative? Is this a delusion?
- Supposing that the premise is true, and we confront the fact that 'reviews aren't written for the reader, but for the reviewer to pursue their other career interests' -- is this new?

That leads me to what seems the basic flaw of the article: that it conflates

a) new problems that arise from digital publishing creating 'disruptions' and crisis for business models (the most obvious problem being that there isn't enough money to pay reviewers anymore)

with

b) general problems with book reviewing, like: conflicts of interest, reluctance to tell the truth about a work's quality (the article posits a case of this, the reviewer being unwilling to trash a book by a junior scholar), insider-dealing and log-rolling, or, again, the fact that a review is *partly* written to advance some cause of the reviewer's (either just financial or maybe even more ambitious and aesthetic) --

all of which are real issues but are very old! You could find them if you go back to eg: Martin Amis on reviewing in the 1970s, or Orwell's 'confessions of a book-reviewer' in 1946 - which I'm sure said, among other things, that book reviewing was a precarious occupation that didn't make much financial sense. I even suspect that you could go back to the age of Grub Street or Addison and Steele and find some similar angst.

So, one would really want an account of these issues that could see how many of the supposed problems are standard stuff, and how many of them are new features of an economically destabilising digital era.

Actually, the article seems to me inaccurate even in more basic ways, eg: in positing that big Contemporary Themed Reviews are the norm, and that they misrepresent or under-represent novels. Strangely, I never see such reviews. You don't really find them in the Guardian, TLS, Literary Review, LRB, NYRB. Presumably you find them somewhere - but if they're absent from so many mainstream spaces, are they really such a problem?

I suppose that all of this has some source in a characteristic n+1 tone (maybe long-standing) - not that I see it that often - which is what I was referring to the other day: very critical, negative, but also world-weary, sarcastic, ironic, generalising, and tends to be self-referential (cf: other n+1 article I'd seen the previous day about how Twitter is awful and unavoidable). I don't really see this tone so much elsewhere, even in the LRB (though eg: the recent review of Oyler was moving more in that direction).

Maybe this editorial is really a bit of an outlier, then. I think the *economic* problems it points to are real, but I'm not so convinced by the rest of its analysis.

Colm Tóibín's review of a biography of Fernando Pessoa was a piece I was nervy about reading as I don't particularly like CT but he has genuine feeling for Pessoa and what he wrote. I am slightly suspicious of his account of Pessoa's politics -- I mean I'd like to believe there were all of these shades to it though I think CT is greying out more than he should -- but his account of the Disquiet is worthy of the great book.

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.

― Piedie Gimbel, Wednesday, August 11, 2021 4:50 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this quote is funny because i disagree with the last point (that the reason criticism is bad now is because each piece of criticism is being read by future prospective employers) for the same reason i agree with the intiial point (that the reason criticism is bad now is not because critics are in a tightly wound social network with obligations towards each other that blunt their incentives)--it was ever thus

was there ever a time when anything writers wrote in public venues was not in some way an "audition" for future writing jobs? that doesn't seem unique to the present moment at all

I agree.

It's odd to stake such a lengthy polemic on such an ahistorical, 'presentist' attitude.

I must admit that LRB 15.7.2021 has a lot in it. I feel like I've spent time on it but haven't even started the presumably superfluous Empson review yet, nor Ian Jack's diary, nor finished the quite informative M. John Harrison article nor the one on alchemy.

"You don't really find them in the Guardian, TLS, Literary Review, LRB, NYRB"

TLS, LRB, NYRB and Lit Review are all terms "reviews" bcz they're actively designed to be a sequence of book reviews (and little more): but in the US in particular there's a strong heritage of quasi-literary magazines dedicated to the long read on all manner of topics, which routinely always veers towards book-coverage: from titles as ancient as harpers (est.1850) or the atlantic (est.1857) via the new yorker of course (est.1925) through, to the much more recent "po-mo" foundations, like the baffler (est.1988) or mcsweeney's (1998). these have a chattier and less scholarly affect to their prose and it seems like that the n+1 piece is attempting to diagnose bad trends in that area? (not that i read anything like enough to know if it's actually accurate or not)

s/b routinely always veers

Mainly for Mark S's amusement I'll add a thought I had:

Polemics about how the Internet has been bad for eg: reviewers (and everything else), while they may make salient points, rarely talk about how the Internet has been good for reviewers.

The most banal aspect of this is so banal that it's never mentioned: it's incredibly easy to send copy in to an editor or publisher, of any kind, nowadays (eg when submitting a whole book MS, never mind a 500-word review).

I suspect that Mark S can recall a time when it was normal to turn up at an office, miles from where you lived, with typed copy to hand over in person to an editor. Or, maybe you'd need to be at the office to type it.

I suspect also that the editor of A HIDDEN LANDSCAPE ONCE A WEEK might add that this actually had good effects, in producing more encounters and exchanges. Still, no one, in their screeds against being online, ever mentions how much more convenient some of these things have become!

lol i mean this is a vast topic and getting bigger -- the specific issue has been the effect of the existence of a single website where the world of prose-production gathers to deliver slices of it max length 280 characters, with its own specific allure and protocols of success (as judged by an audience but also as judged by the writers who engage with it). ppl like it and want to capture that in otjer prose forms! and also the hate it and ditto ditto. they want to explore how "being good at twitter" mighty deliver content -- and possibly even value -- away from twitter

and some ppl think it's bad and can't, and frame the change in that way. is this related to the fact that i can email someone at the paris review to say i want to write about celebrity gogglebox? yers and no! is it related to the fact that a vital now vanished aspect of magazine life in the 80s and still a little in the 90s was the in-office culture of the editorial team? also yes and no!

LRB 15.7.2021.

Nick Richardson has a chequered past on the LRB - but hand it to him here, he's informative about M. J. Harrison, makes me feel that Harrison should have been covered here much more, covers the whole career in a way that feels reliable, is playful about SF while recognising its value, and makes the recent novel sound rich in its melancholy, as he (NR) quotes phrase after phrase that are actually relevant.

A good review - _pace_ the claims that reviews aren't good or useful anymore.

Richard Norton-Taylor on the IRA and British intelligence: a topic I like, an informed writer, an interestingly sceptical view of the book that, however, is never really fully revealed (ie: RNT doesn't really tell us how bad the book is or why, just hints at it). And yet - some disastrous writing / proofing / editing here. There are lines that don't quite grammatically accord; a quotation that seems bizarrely mangled in p.43 column 2 top para; and what looks a classic failure of drafting (copying and pasting without tidying up) as a phrase ('fierce debate') is quoted without introduction, then properly introduced 2 paras later.

Malcolm Gaskill on alchemy: a lot better than the same author on quitting his academic post. Oddly long, I'm still only halfway through it.

But I also at last, over a pint by the Thames, read blokeish Burrow on Empson. It's been discussed already here but the main thought must surely be a degree of disbelief that the LRB is publishing another long essay on Empson - and not occasioned by the necessity of, eg: a brand new volume of Empson letters, or a reconstituted series of lectures that we didn't know, but just two of his most famous books being reissued. Admittedly they're scholarly editions - in which case shouldn't the review mainly have been about what these editions specifically bring, how well and badly the annotation is done, etc? It only touches on that.

So much of all this is familiar - at least two LRB mainstays have written at length on Empson before; even Frank Kermode who practically invented the LRB loved Empson, as far as it went - it's hard to justify another introduction to Empson in these pages. Yet some of it is actually quite good. And some of it is quite bad. Readers will be glad to know that I can't be bothered to talk about what's bad, except that I must say that CB's major metaphor - Empson 'taking his false teeth out' - as well as ugly and distracting, is remarkably bad and unclarifying even on its own terms.

But one has also to remark on the meta-fact of Burrow reviewing this. Whom do you associate with the LRB? O'Hagan and Lanchester, yes. Wilmers, hitherto, and Diski, et al. Wood. Even Anderson and Bennett, in their niches; or nowadays Lockwood. But the odd thing is - Burrow seems to dominate the LRB more than any of these - without being anyone notable; without having arrived with fanfare; without any of us probably, for instance, knowing what he looks like. He's like a - yes, I'm tempted to say, he's like a Japanese knot-weed that has crept over the paper. And here, as well as spreading the usual bluff blokeish declarations, he's reviewing 'admirable' editions by ... Seamus Perry, an LRB regular whom I actually used to confuse with Burrow; and (with someone else) Stefan Collini. It could hardly be more of an inside job. Does it occur to anyone at the LRB that this could look at all bad? I doubt it.

You could find them if you go back to eg: Martin Amis on reviewing in the 1970s, or Orwell's 'confessions of a book-reviewer' in 1946 - which I'm sure said, among other things, that book reviewing was a precarious occupation that didn't make much financial sense.

Thanks for mentioning the Orwell piece, which is online. It's an amusing piece which does in fact mention the financial situation of the typical book reviewer (If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover.) It also overlaps with some of the same complaints in the n+1 piece, some of which are very old indeed, such as the fact that most books are simply not very good and there's not much one would wish to say about them, if one were not being paid to do so, and thus the reviewer is often compelled to feign more enthusiasm either positive or negative than they actually feel, in order to make it seem that there is some reason for the reader to care about the book under discussion.

in the US in particular there's a strong heritage of quasi-literary magazines dedicated to the long read on all manner of topics

I was also wondering about where all these "Contemporary Themed Reviews" are appearing, but I think this hits the nail on the head.

Here's a response which suggests than n+1 itself is a place where many pieces of this type have appeared over the years:

N+1 has arguably been the best home for CTRs since its founding: examples include Marco Roth's essays on neuronovels and clone novels; Nicholas Dames on theory novels and novels nostalgic for the 1970s; an unsigned piece on globalized literature (written, I believe, by Nikil Saval); and myself on something I called "magic feelism."

https://www.gawker.com/media/the-intellectuals-are-having-a-situation

Wow! Amazing to see this immediate, lengthy and remarkably persuasive riposte. Thanks, o.nate!

I scrolled down at first and was surprised to find that this was by Christian Lorentzen. I didn't think I liked him. (I met him once!) But now I like him a bit more.

LRB 29.7.2021.

Lanchester on cheating in sport: not entirely bereft of insight, and he *knows* a lot (for instance, he knows far more than I do about chess, a game I quite like, and rugby, which I don't). But I'm not very convinced by the fundamental claims about 'rules' vs 'ethos', whose basis is unexamined and not argued for. He also makes the mistake of thinking that "fans" think the same thing about everything, when they don't.

But the most glaring offence in Lanchester is simply his ready recourse to entirely unnecessary obscenity. This is telling, not only of his coarseness of mind, but of his complacency as an LRB regular. If I wrote for the LRB (which is, precisely, something that won't happen), I wouldn't write slackly and I wouldn't write obscenities unless it were necessary. That Lanchester does this shows a kind of privileged contempt for others.

Yet this one line struck me as actually good: "Rugby players don't feign injury, they feign health".

*banging clipboard*
HIRE 👏 ADRIAN 👏 CHILES 👏

LRB 29.7.2021.

Clare Bucknell on Rivka Galchen: I can't say I really want to read Galchen's very specific historical novel, but credit to her for taking on something so abstruse. She seems an intelligent, thoughtful writer.

Alison Light on Barbara Pym: mostly quite well done, but didn't give me much idea of how Pym's fiction was actually interesting and worth reading. I glanced at a review of the same book in the TLS, other object of this thread, and it ended by heretically saying that Larkin's excessive praise of Pym had become a curse - which was at least an interesting provocation.

Andrew O'Hagan, very briefly 'on the bus': dreadful. He shouldn't be allowed to print this stuff.

Hal Foster on Absentees: the concept seems to bring together too many different things; the review becomes a pretentious parade of names.

Gary Younge on Baltimore: solid, factual, informative.

Lavinia Greenlaw on Diana statue: quite interesting to hear about it aloft a Madison Square Garden no longer in existence.

Patrick Leigh Fermor on Mani olives: one of those odd cases where they print an old text that someone's discovered. I don't know this author, but at times I felt: yes, that's fine, composed writing - unlike what I might often read here. On the other hand, out of context, it was hard to tell what it was all for or about. I've never heard of Mani. It took me a while to find out that it is some kind of place in Greece.

Nicholas Penny on Rosemary Hill and antiquaries: a lot of circularity here: Hill being reviewed because she reviews for the LRB; Penny returning to the same kind of thing on which, I think, he wrote quite impenetrably recently; and it was only, what, 3 months?, since the last article on antiquaries. I quite like the very grudging last paragraph, attacking modern fashions. Many might not.

That n+1 article discussed here complained about the Contemporary Themed Review.

Some of us didn't know what that was or couldn't recall often seeing it.

Oddly, something like it perhaps appears here, in Vanity Fair:
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/08/the-state-of-the-literary-jonathans

Shockingly bad, offensive article; should never have been published, or indeed written. In a way, maybe its existence does give some validation to the n+1 complaint.

the author of that piece is married to one of the prime n+1 dudes haha

That is a terrific piece. This is a very funny way of saying how fucked it is to try and write for a living.

Most authors have day jobs, which is nothing new; Herman Melville worked as a customs inspector. The difference in 2021 is that traditional side careers are less viable and also less “side.” My 50-plus-year-old friends worked as typists and came home with creative juice left in the tank. Employers today demand 24/7 access to your mind and soul and claim to be “like family,” which is accurate in the darkest sense. The competition for tenure-track MFA jobs is so intense that candidates are virtually clawing one another’s eyes out over the chance to move to, for example, Arizona. The other way authors used to make a living was journalism. In 2021, that’s like working as an aspiring actor to subsidize your true passion, waiting tables.

My 50-plus-year-old friends worked as typists and came home with creative juice left in the tank.

their fingers were probably pretty sore though

Bit of repetitive strain injury, as a treat

LRB 29.7.2021.

Michael Wood on Paul Celan: the first page did not make Celan, with his wistful, wry and unilluminating late remarks, sound interesting. But the review picks up by becoming quite scholarly - or, simply, doing something that Wood, in his books as much as reviews, occasionally does: delving into facts, chronologies, producing and assembling them for a reader who needs to know them. He then gets into close reading, which I respect though what he quotes of the poetry still does little for me.

Andrea Brady on poet John Wieners: makes this poet sound dire, self-indulgent and utterly uninteresting.

Peter Phillips on Thomas Tallis: a relatively rare instance of the LRB using such technical terms and knowledge (here it's musicology and ecclesiastical history) that the 'lay reader' can't follow it.

Simon Cartledge on Hong Kong: I naturally dislike the superfluous obscenities, but otherwise informative on the tense situation. Gives the impression that China is bad and oppressive to HK and its people; a bit more surprisingly suggests that this presents problems for China, and that a movement for HK independence is growing.

I'd forgotten to mention an unusually bad letters page: a couple of the letters on Beatles vs Stones are as dreadful as almost any I've read in the paper.

wait, what was hard to follow in the tallis piece? it was interesting and lucid!

it's true that the LRB remains non-great on music (= doesn't commission me or say yes to my very good pitches)

Mark S: I think the short answer is just - technical terms. The very first sentence uses a religious term that I don't know.

But maybe it's just that I have zero idea of the music being referred to.