Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

I read AMJ's contributions to the short story collection A DARKER PROOF (1988). The stories are all about AIDS and people living with, or dying from, it. AMJ's stories are sensitive, well crafted, subtle, touching. They showed me an aspect of life that it was good to be shown.

I like some of AMJ's non-fiction eg his polemic vs Amis & McEwan, VENUS ENVY (1990), which is at least at times outstanding.

I find him to be one of the greatest, most entertaining fiction reviewers of our time, though I'm not sure I could say he was even my favourite LRB fiction reviewer, as Michael Wood is my favourite living critic and for that matter Christopher Tayler is very good at this job.

I had to scroll back to read the earlier review of the SF piece, I read it during the summer and liked it a lot.

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.

There was, in fact, ample evidence of Chanel’s collaboration, not only through the Dincklage connection but also because she had taken the opportunity to settle scores with the firm of Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, Jews whom she considered had swindled her out of profits from Chanel No. 5. It was the intercession of an old society friend, Winston Churchill, that got her off the hook in 1944 and enabled her to retreat to Lausanne.

Quality post; welcome back comrade gyac.

LRB 7.10.2021.

Colin Burrow on Christopher Ricks: blokeish Burrow is almost always unbearable, yet his review does have the virtue of not just saluting Ricks but actually getting to grips with the limits of, and doubts about, his project. Burrow's not very wrong about these. It's classic LRB-insider territory that one of the areas where he engages with Ricks is ... Ricks's comments on Burrow's own edition of Shakespeare.

Thomas Jones on Milman Parry: the 'big idea' seems to be that Homer was from oral or musical tradition - but was that new? This doesn't really come across to me.

Miriam Dobson on Maria Stepanova: the book sounds boring, generic and self-indulgent.

Paul Mendez on David Keenan: I expected this to be laudatory and, though I don't approve of every line, I'm impressed by how much it turns into a rejection by the end. Good to see such tough-mindedness especially re: a current writer.

Adam Shatz on Richard Wright: this looks authoritative but it's really full of corner-cutting, bland words, over-easy formulations. Quite interesting, still, to realise how much RW was taken on as a European intellectual later in life.

pf sez: "the 'big idea' seems to be that Homer was from oral or musical tradition"

hmmm but setting aside the LRB-ish greed for the biographical quirks of minor scholars (which i have to admit i too lap up) the 'big idea' that the review wrestles is not so much "what our theory of homer shd be!" and more "why this theory now (ie then when it was being explored and debated)?" -- viz was this shift towards an oral and a collective theory caused by the technological shift in documentation that it evidently coincides with -- viz from the written to the recorded (cue pic of gigantic phonograph horn)?

(naturally this overlaps with my own interests = the cultural effects of the arrival of various modern technologies)

plus echoing piedie on user gyac's post! i had not intended my intervention to feel as dismissive of the actual discussion of the science of perfume as it is, more that for force of argument's sake fitzgerald shd have owned her own territories of interest more firmly: "this is probably all very fascinating but i don't get it and don 't care to" is a tricky move to make -- bcz potentially alienating -- and i don't think SF makes it tidily and hence somewhat miscues a piece that is in the event readable and useful

No I didn’t think you were being dismissive, I was responding to the pinefox saying that the gobbledegook comment to him felt that way. Agree on the approach she should have taken. Thanks to you and PG, very kind.

But in another sense, a phonograph cylinder or a captain’s log or a flight recorder are also versions of the vampire’s coffin: through them the dead are revived and speak again.

With its interest in the logistics of moving goods and money from one place to another, and in the minutiae of the count’s investments in London property, Dracula is in many ways a novel about capitalism.

The coffin, a writing surface close to death, is the only object to survive the Pequod’s wreck. It serves as a lifeboat to convey Ishmael to safety – which, given that Ishmael is our narrator, makes it a device that delivers to us the entire content of the novel. It’s a literal narrative vehicle.

Would like to see more reviews of this:

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything🕸/

i have to say contra a lot of people i like and admire i am wary of graeber. wary, no more, but encounter him cautiously and with my pen out for marginal commentary.

this tom mccarthy essay is v by numbers: tintin, moby dick, dracula, victorian technology etc. makes you wonder what he’s been doing for the last x years.

Gilbreth is a fascinating figure: a lifelong Republican who flirted with eugenics, she is also credited with vastly improving shop-floor conditions and with allowing workers to participate in those improvements. Lenin saw her methods as revolutionary, and rolled them out across the Soviet Union.

bit

tbf her MA thesis being on Bartholomew Fair is unexpected.

"tintin, moby dick, dracula, victorian technology": ok but this sounds good not bad

well it is but it’s v much tom mccarthy territory and has been in most of his writing. the informational content isn’t bad tbh, but his “it is, in the full technological sense, vampiric” manner is. there is no full technological sense in which things are vampiric.

we live, one could say, inside a giant black box

in many ways we are all stealing king ottakhar's sceptre

you’ve read the essay then?

Great comments Fizzles.

TM is dire at this stuff.

graeber-world (including on ilx!!) is very much torn between ppl who throw the entire book at the wall bcz he is super-careless with facts he doesn't need to be careless with (his stans shout "mere pedantry" but the other side can point to a mounting pile) and ppl who greatly enjoy the energy with which he seems to be dismantling a larger orthodoxy, and align with the implied politics (they argue that the mounting pile of wrong facts doesn't really affect the bigger picture)

when the debt book came out he had a guest spot at crooked timber which went famously badly: like a sequence of essays from CT's regulars and invited guests from different disciplines picking at various elements -- the overall tone was "we're broadly pretty excited by this book, here's some elements we'd like to explore more plus this on page xx seems wonky" and he flounced away from this in a tremendously silly thin-skinned rage very early on

(CT has many many enraging faults and he possibly had a point, or was just still too close to the material, but he did not cover himself in thoughtful glory)

i also slightly know someone who roomed with him at college, who was quite sardonic abt him and his politics given his background (but tbh they hate literally everyone so)

LRB 7.10.2021

Michael Wood on Proust: back on form! I don't like Proust but MW can make even Proust fairly worthwhile. I also note, again, how good MW can be at simply conveying facts - an underrated activity.

Christopher Tayler on Jenny Erpenbeck: felt to me that Tayler, usually an excellent and interesting reviewer, was struggling to find something interesting to say about this writer, who sounds dull, even though East Germany is not a dull topic.

John Whitfield on scientific publication: excellent: one of the clearest things to appear in the LRB for a long time (again, information is good), and relatively rare for them to go into this area, which can actually be an interesting one.

i am halfway thru the mccarthy and so far i summarise it thus: "if everything is writing and everything is machines and everything is capitalism then in conclusion everything is everything else! also in this tintin book one time tintin used a wireless or something, just like moby-dick if radios were harpoons"

That sounds very accurate, and a good demonstration of why TM is bad, which is what I understood Fizzles to be showing.

yes

this writer, who sounds dull

(re: Erpenbeck) fwiw I've only read Visitation by her but it wasn't dull.

Somehow I reach LRB 18.11.2021.

Tom McCarthy, black box: Fizzles' critique of this was entirely accurate. But Fizzles is generous. He was too polite to add that this article is shockingly, shamefully bad.

The first two paragraphs alone should make anyone doubtful about publishing McCarthy - as a human being, never mind an intellectual. The whole article makes you wonder how he keeps getting published. Someone ought to say: no more of this. Time's up.

lol. the poverty of the essay and the fact that he hasn’t moved on *at all* did make me wonder if it was some sort of LRB dole for old time’s sake and because he needs it.

oh wait he has a novel out how did i miss this.

wapo review written by a good friend, oh god.

a favourable review that makes it sound awful lol.

will read obv even tho satin island was dreck.

mccarthy had somehow entirely passed me by till now -- presumably bcz i dont read or think abt present-day novels that much and maybe also bcz his earlier LRB pieces are mainly reviews of same? so i've just skipped em?

what's so maddening abt this *particular* piece for me is that it's full of things i'm otherwise interested in (writing! technology! the technology of writing! vampires! whalers! tintin AND derrida, together at last!), all yok'd by violence together except it's not violence so much as a kind of slack-jawed attention drift with nothing at all behind it. i've had the same abreaction in the past against erik davies and friedrich kittler, who he quotes here several times…

also i used the search engine to see what ppl had said abt him and found this, miss u nilmar

tom mccarthy should write a roman a clef about the period of research lanchester undertakes prior to the writing of this book

― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Monday, 10 June 2013 20:41 (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Mark S: to my recollection, his earlier LRB articles are not reviews, but pontifications like this one. They're dire.

From Fizzles' link:

In McCarthy’s telling, it seems she may have found it — but her archive at Purdue lacks the crucial jigsaw piece (it is “perdu,” or “lost,” as McCarthy punningly observes).

yes. i think i physically winced and made a slight retching sound at that.

xpost to mark - yeah it’s that everything=everything attenuation (that is to say no tautness or direction between the composite elements) or drift that really grinds.

letting myself off the hook somewhat as the lrb search engine says he hasn't written for them since 2014 and only delivered six pieces ever, inc a blog (on kittler zzzz) and two reviews

someone described the premise of the new Nathan Fielder show and it sounded exactly like the plot of Remainder

a long time ago there was a very long colm toibin piece on lowell and hardwick which tested this thread's patience lol: this is a more useful route into some of the same material i think (as in, one of the same books): https://newrepublic.com/article/164389/vivian-gornick-wrong-elizabeth-hardwick-biography-review

Super happy to read grumbling about McCarthy, his stuff is so bad, and he always seems to have many defenders

This is on the books by Malm. See the LRB has two pieces on him, which according to this is a laughable state of affairs.

https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/ecological-leninism-friend-or-foe/

V funny bit that mentions Lanchester.

Malm’s superficial engagement with the era of militant environmentalism in the United States also means that he omits single incidents that would have been relevant for his book. For example, he speaks of “Lanchester’s paradox”, named, by Malm himself, after the British novelist John Lanchester who opened a 2007 piece in the London Review of Books with the observation: “It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism,” for example “vandalizing SUVs”. In the year 2000, Jeff “Free” Luers was sentenced to 22 years in prison (eventually serving ten) for doing exactly that, at a car dealership in Eugene, Oregon. The case drew attention far beyond the borders of both the United States and militant environmentalism. It seems odd that Malm would make vandalizing SUVs a main feature of his book without mentioning Luers once.

a long time ago there was a very long colm toibin piece on lowell and hardwick which tested this thread's patience lol: this is a more useful route into some of the same material i think (as in, one of the same books): https://newrepublic.com/article/164389/vivian-gornick-wrong-elizabeth-hardwick-biography-review

― mark s, Thursday, 18 November 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Read this last night - really great. I love pieces where the writer goes 'I was wrong'.

imperative someone now write an actually good piece on "tintin, moby dick, dracula, victorian technology" for me to read.

i mean in a sense dracula is already a book on victorian technology tintin

it's mainly just filling in v minor victorian blanks -- when did arthur hugh clough's poetry last matter if ever? -- but i enjoyed fergus mcghee's piece, which is witty on the english hexameter as a vector mainly for uncertanty and changing yr mind a lot and places this very minor man as an oh so mind-changeable hinge between several much more robust 19th century figures (wordsworth, arnold, florence nightingale)

also it helped me slightly unmuddle him from arthur henry hallam (who is even more minor if that's possible but also the anguished topic of tennyson's in memoriam, as blind-quoted in one of my favourite m r james stories and as read by dr wilson to and from the pole bcz he was a total gloombot lol)

anyway florence nightingale's brusque note is very funny: lytton strachey notwithstanding she is absolutely the most modern figure mentioned

i guess both the arnolds in fact

a long time ago there was a very long colm toibin piece on lowell and hardwick which tested this thread's patience lol: this is a more useful route into some of the same material i think (as in, one of the same books): https://newrepublic.com/article/164389/vivian-gornick-wrong-elizabeth-hardwick-biography-review🕸

― mark s, Thursday, 18 November 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Read this last night - really great. I love pieces where the writer goes 'I was wrong'.

Mark S: amusingly, I hope, until halfway through your post above I was confusing A.H. Clough with A.H. Hallam.

they are the same! (they are not the same but they are very easily confused)