Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

I missed the space telescope and Hoban in the last one, will have to go back to them.

10/2/22 Lethem on Lem might be the final push I need to read more Lem. And maybe to get started on Lethem. Also enjoyed the diary, and Nagel on Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch - ironically because he makes less of an effort than in his last piece to make the philosophy seem important or useful to anyone outside of the discipline.

Wolfgang Streeck: actually an egregious example of LRB style. He reviews a book arguing that technocracy and populism can, surprisingly, be combined, by people like Blair and Macron. Rather than assessing these claims, he utterly ignores them and writes an essay about Angela Merkel, whom the authors had consciously *not* included in their arguments.

Lol, tbh, this doesn't bother me as much as it probably should. My main aim in reading something like the LRB is to be entertained and learn something, though not necessarily about the book in question. This piece gave me a new perspective on Merkel which I found interesting.

i have been enjoying “flicking through” (electronically) the TLS recently. no, no particular articles. just the aggregate of shorter stuff really.

re "is stuff getting shorter" -- i've read several pieces in recent issues which felt as if they were brought to a close very abuptly, almost cut-from-the-bottom style. just as the writer seemed to be easing into the second half of the discussion on the next spread there was that abrupt little square

(this is a newish sensation: i think post-MKW there *is* an emergent new editorial ecology, tho i don't think it's bedded in quite yet

also: the joe dunthorne diary in v44i3 -- i think this story is almost entirely made up

a couple of the wider scams he mentions -- which obviously don't involve him -- are real and on-going

Who, if anyone, had said that LRB articles were getting shorter?

Perhaps it was me. I don't recall it.

re: "brought to a close very abuptly, almost cut-from-the-bottom style" -- this has been very precisely my sensation with numerous LRB articles for a very long time, but *not* recently.

I once attended an LRB event about Frank Kermode, and made precisely this observation about FK's articles, and the panelists coyly turned to MKW asking her if it was true, and she said nothing, and my question was dissipated very unhelpfully.

Fizzles: do you need a subscription to do what you are doing with the TLS?

One reader on twitter recently bought up the question of articles getting shorter.

oh yes lol it was twitter, i thought it was here

frank "the sense of an ending" kermode: say it aint so

I did reply that I didn't get a sense of that happening but that was after spending most of an evening getting through an issue and thinking it isn't a very different experience from before.

The Rosemary Hill article in v44i3 was a particularly noticeable example of being cut off in mid flow.

i think that was the piece i primarily had in mind: maybe they've always done it and they're just getting more brazen or careless or clumsy

I think they're doing it less !

Re things getting shorter - they apologise for accidentally cutting off the last line of a recent Jorie Graham poem in the new issue! I wonder who other than Jorie might have ever noticed?

my child aged four could have painted it!

i never read any of the poems so definitely not me

Fizzles: do you need a subscription to do what you are doing with the TLS?

So, Fizzles -- it sounds like the answer is ... "yes" ?

You do have a subscription and that's why / how you are reading these articles?

Sorry, slight misreading, i thought the question was 'do you need a subscription to do what you need to do,' not 'what you are doing with the TLS'. The answer is indeed yes.

Though it also certainly used to be the sort of thing to which libraries subscribe, including digital subscriptions.

William Davies on the new issue on the ongoing assault on humanities courses, what is valued when teaching literacy (crossing experiences of friends and his own children in various parts of the system). It's something that's been written about in the LRB a lot by different people over the years, and ofc, given that the mag is a showcase of sorts on the values undergoing the kinds of assault it's not a surprise. Though I don't think the university as a haven from the values outside it's gates has ever really been written much about. The last line in the piece -- around writing and reading without judgement and evaluation -- is not something that can be enjoyed by people who want to, because it doesn't pay the rent. It's not as if Davies doesn't know this reality, but to face it is another matter.

On the other hand: James Meek on Ukraine is good - informed, readable, hostile to Vladimir Putin while also resisting notions of a Russian masterplan.

I read this last night. Of course it's easy to criticize with hindsight, but overall I found it informative, especially about trying to understand Putin's state of mind. Although Meek, like many analysts at the time, has a hard time conceiving that Putin would actually do what he eventually did, the article overall is not dismissive of such fears and ends on an ominous note.

Accurate assessment.

Meek has also written a ton of later LRB blog posts from Kyiv, which I've not yet read.

I didn't know about the blog posts. I'll check them out. Something that Zeynep Tufekci said that I think is true is that generally speaking military analysts did a better job of predicting this invasion than political analysts. Experts on Russian politics reasoned (perhaps correctly) that from a domestic political perspective this action made little sense, so that led them to discount the risk. Military analysts on the other hand studied closely the forces being deployed and rightly concluded on that basis that there was no other reasonable explanation for such a build-up other than an invasion.

LRB 27.1.2022 - for once I read a whole issue, every word, even the poems, which I didn't like.

Helen Thaventhiran on Rita Felski: I don't think this entirely hits the mark but it's good that it treats Felski with scepticism. I see that RF has replied in a later issue. What emerges is the odd spectacle of academics struggling to find ways to say "I enjoy this text" - I'm reminded of Michael Wood saying of the very late Barthes that his declarations of being moved by literature could only seem a radical move to someone to whom this hadn't been normal discourse for decades. A bit too much Zadie Smith in this particular review, anyway.

Philip Terry on Lascaux paintings as code: extraordinary! The things sometimes tucked away in the Diary, secrets waiting to be found.

David Thomson on Matthew Specktor on Hollywood: I left this till last, and found it possibly the finest work I've read in the LRB in a long time. It bears quoting a little.

His book is in some ways a work of critical commentary, as mind-expanding as a perfect peach (eat it now – by tomorrow it may be going off).

There’s a moment’s misgiving as we wonder if this is a set-up for pure puffery. Don’t fret: the peaches are all from the same tree, with secrets about creative careers piercing the reverie of what it has been to be Matthew Specktor, ever yearning and searching for ‘success’, knowing all the while that the swimming pool was waiting. The book is not reliable as biography, but the lives discussed did not organise themselves around facts, or any thought that these people knew what was happening to them. We know the scenario is evolving out of reach. We make stuff up.

She had one other big credit, The Fortune (1975), which has passed into history as a failure, buried beneath the weight of Mike Nichols, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, such pals that no one trusted anyone. Specktor admits that he is ‘unabashedly in love’ with Eastman (as if ‘unabashedly’ was a decent trope of sincerity), and I think that’s because in life and in Hollywood, possibility is the most touching thing – and the thing that can have you waiting by the phone for months.

Not that I can believe he would write about anyone he didn’t love, probably without knowing them, just having them perpetually on the screen.

I’d guess she is nicely discontented.

Just imagine what the film of Play It As It Lays might have been if for three minutes Weld had ignored the script and the subdued looming of Mother Didion, and just been funnier and smarter than Milton Berle. Never happened, but keep it in mind.

I regretted that he had too little space for Cimino, who went on to publish novels in France which have never been translated into English. One of them, Big Jane, is ‘the story of a six-and-a-half feet tall female motorcycle enthusiast who escapes the dullness of 1950s Long Island to fight in the Korean War’. Tell us more. Cimino had deep strains of the fake in him: he lied a lot, but in LA, lies are allowed, or just forgiven and reappraised as word of mouth.

It isn’t that Kael didn’t deserve some comeuppance, and she had walked off her own plank by going out to LA (she couldn’t drive!) to produce or counsel Warren Beatty and James Toback. Nobody said Kael was smart: brilliant, yes, but out of line silly or desirous. Like anyone patient enough to read 8000 words on Kael’s prose, Adler seemed shocked by the aggression in what she had done. She is alive still somewhere in the East, undiminished. Yet that isn’t quite plausible; you feel she ought to be holed up in a comped suite in Las Vegas, playing three-dimensional solitaire with gangsters and sheikhs.

Nobody else could do this.

Yeah, I loved that.

LRB 24.2.2022.

William Davies on 'the mechanisation of learning'. This actually covers a number of areas: plagiarism; online learning; the pandemic; the business / economic side; ideology; the idea of a utilitarian approach to the humanities and their eclipse by other subjects; finally anxieties about language.

The article is well informed and mostly measured and careful in tone. That's one of its best features. I think WD correct to think that economics, ideology, technology are all interrelated here, all motivating and driving factors in what's happening.

He's correct that there is a 'crisis' (another one!) in the humanities purely in the sense of numbers taking them in HE, which threatens them much more than any mere ideological controversy. He's correct to see that these raw numbers, and the effect of government policy, are what ultimately most shapes things, and the positions that academics take are froth on the top by comparison.

I think, though, that he doesn't fully pursue every point that he makes; that he can be evasive or too ready to say what people want to hear without fuller investigation.

There is now an idea that 'English in schools has become mechanical; pupils are learning grammar in an inhuman way; it leaves no room for imagination'. WD echoes all this, and doesn't challenge any of it. It could be that these claims are largely true. But one should at least try looking at them from other angles. Was English in schools so great before? Was knowledge of grammar or other technicalities worse than we would like? (Yes, in that most of us, like me, have no idea about these things.) Is it a good idea to change this? (Maybe.) Is there a better way to do that than the current system? (Maybe.) Is the current, supposedly rigorous system actually improving literacy or producing a generation or two of people with a better grasp of English and languages? ... Anecdotally, I don't see any evidence that it is. But we should try to assess these outcomes rather than just starting with an idea that we don't like this approach to English and then finding circular confirmation of this view everywhere.

Another odd feature, that WD doesn't seem to notice, is that in such discussions, things like mathematics and sciences become rather disdained, as the opposite of humanities, and as what, lamentably, pupils and students now prefer to study. On p.8 he laments 'a long queue to speak to the maths and science teachers' at a private school, while humanities are ignored. Sure, that's worrying for the livelihoods of humanities teachers. But I feel like it wasn't long since I was hearing that there was a dearth of interest in maths and sciences, a dearth of teachers, a dearth of knowledge in this country (doubtless in contrast to Korea). Is that changing? Is the UK getting better at maths and sciences? If so, that would actually be ... a good thing. And, in truth, maths and sciences aren't ultimately totally unrelated to the humanities, or uncreative themselves. There are ways to bring these things together.

Lastly, WD's account of 'heightened anxiety' about correct language is insightful and useful in tying this to a more fragmented sense of language that now exists (isolated words and snippets circulating without context), but incomplete in then saying that such anxieties come back to the kind of 'mechanistic' educational approaches he deplores.

I haven't read the article directly above but just want to comment that the pinefox's analysis seems to capture aspects of the current situation in linguistics as I understand it. (1) Departments seem to be shrinking. (2) A long shift to rule-based (e.g., Chomsky) and statistical approaches (e.g., Manning) does not seem to have affected how those outside the discipline view it. I think people tend to think of anthropologists and field linguistics or historical linguistics, which are still important subdisciplines. (3) The object of study (i.e., spoken language) is being transformed into online speech.

<blockquote>I think, though, that he doesn't fully pursue every point that he makes; that he can be evasive or too ready to say what people want to hear without fuller investigation.</blockquote>

I am not sure the pinefox agrees fundamentally that there is a problem, but I am guessing he wants the humanities to survive and wants its defenders to do a better job. I think the resolution might have to do with an investigation, understanding, and defense of methodology that can stand up to the sciences on its own terms.

(I should have clicked on formatting help; I am beyond help ... For example, law has stare decisis vs. pragmatic effect ...)

LRB 24.2.2022.

Neal Ascherson on Brezhnev: I must admit, NA is well-informed about this stuff. I learned something. Makes a change for Sheila Fitzpatrick not to be writing about the USSR.

On to Laleh Kahili on Stanley McChrystal. I'd forgotten the episode where President Obama fired him. That was a surprise and felt like a risk.

LRB 24.2.2022: a good session reading more of this in a pub last night:

David Trotter on Garbo: something incongruous about DT coming on as a big film expert, and yet ... I suppose he *is* a big film expert. Some great Hollywood details and some decent sidelong witty writing in the review.

Seamus Perry on Colm Toibin: too much fastidious fiddling of a kind that can obscure thought. Too much obsequiousness, eg about CT's 'fine Jamesian essays'. Can't you acknowledge that CT might in some way not always be good? Yet knowledge here too: of Mann, of James, and of Yeats who makes for a genuinely productive suggestion at the end, ie: that CT should write a novel about him. And the description of CT's novel sounding like a biography is very suggestive, though SP could entertain the idea that this is just bad writing rather than a clever aesthetic effect.

Tony Wood and Michael Wood share the same page. TW on Mexico City conveys teeming vastness. MW makes NIGHTMARE ALLEY sound interesting but loses the thread; but I like a lot the opening play with the line from César Vallejo.

the very first LRB i bought had a charcoal portrait of the young neal ascherson on the cover

i was introduced to him once at a test department show of all things (he was somehow involved with its libretto or research for its libretto; it was the show where the performance space gradually fills with water and the audience had to clamber up onto little made of piles of sandbags)

anyway he was perfectly friendly but also hugely drunk lol

His Brezhnev article is announced as his 100th for the LRB.

yr mention upthread suggests you have a degree of scepticism towards him, or anyway mild impatience? i first encountered him writing from poland during the solidarnosc era when he was really very good indeed (eastern europe is his zone of for.corresp.expertise) so i am perhaps today more indulgent than i shd be?

but i basically think he's a good thing not a bad…

I agree that he is more good than bad.

caught up with the David Thompson/Spektor piece pinefox praises upthread and it is indeed excellent. v much want to read the book.

thomson

for some reason this stuck with me (on the revolting sounding zevon)

The Q whom Specktor kissed had once been involved with Zevon, and Specktor asked her: ‘Did you ever forgive him?’ She looks at him and ponders, like a Tuesday Weld close-up: ‘I never thought of it that way.’

LRB 10.3.2022: again I open the wrong issue, am all out of order. No dates on the envelopes these days!

I've read about 5 articles here and none are exceptionally interesting - Simon Akam on the Army probably the standout though. Will Reynolds on McLaren (a figure who, if I think about it, doesn't appeal or interest me at all) be the highlight?

as someone who's recently read quite a lot abt thomas cromwell and watches every TV romp feat.the tudors i found the piece on the dissolution of the monasteries genuinely interesting and useful

we tend to encounter it merely as a side-issue in the melodrama of ann boleyn (and we tend to see e.g. monks as losers and not worthy of our attention) -- but it was a colossal and a radical re-organisation: the wiping away of a whole layer of social activity (and the transfer of a much smaller strand of it into proto-modern schools and universities) (which we now regard as unustly surviving institutes of privilege)

i also like james butler's piece on medieval possession and exorcisms but it's more about diverting anecdotes than a sketch of a wider and very different world (and i'm less of a fan of ken russell's THE DEVILS than butler is, derek jarman's design notwithstanding)

just completed akam on the army and i agree that it is very good: starts with the relatively easy task of taking apart a bad and lazy book, but brings to this a LOT of strong and interesting critical information, including the author's own travails when penguin random house got cold feet and cancelled *his* (much better sounding) book abt these issues

Akam's own book was prominently reviewed by the LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n13/tom-stevenson/the-most-corrupt-idea-of-modern-times

Butler did a good job with his task re Exorcism, but I found the article rather pointless. It's odd that Penguin have even published a special anthology of Exorcism, at this point.

My impression re: closing monasteries was that it was mainly about generating wealth for the Crown. Have not much looked into it and am only 30% through the article on it, which is well-written and of course expert.

Of the two rock biogs recently reviewed Lavinia Greenlaw did a bit better when drawing out interest in Nico than Simon Reynolds did for McLaren. This, despite the latter being very much a one-off, and despite Reynolds having this obsession that he seems embarrassed by now. Maybe he should forget it all, but why should we?

Diarmaid Macculloch is so good! I really enjoyed the piece on the monasteries too. I couldn't get into James Butler's piece. Agree that the David Thomson piece from a few issues back was superb too.

One of piece I really liked was Laleh Klalili on this book by a former US army type that goes through the soldier to consultant to author to kinda guru industry. Very strong, powerful ending.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/laleh-khalili/stupid-questions

Diarmaid MacCulloch's long and knowledgeable article ultimately left me unsure why the vast dissolution of monasteries process had taken place at all, except for one brief reference to my own very half-baked idea that it happened to get finance for the Crown.

Hal Foster on Kurt Schwitters is crisp as usual but processes it all through a set of abstractions that quickly come to feel banal.

Simon Reynolds on Malcolm McLaren: for much of the article I found this dreadful. McLaren comes across as a horrible, selfish, destructive individual who purveyed bad creative work, and Reynolds as a vapid cheerleader for empty ideas of 'subversion', who seems to have gained nothing in maturity in the last 30 or 40 years despite the profound experiences that he has doubtless gone through. And yet - in the last column or two, it changes. SR actually says that MMcL was bad, and did bad things, and this should be counted against him. His statement that 'destruction and disorder are the opposite of what we need today' is vague enough to be right or wrong depending on context, but it's potentially more serious and constructive than the garbage he's been espousing earlier.

Yet in the last lines he lets this welcome turn lead him to the extreme of apparently saying, not merely that we should stop talking about punk, but that we should do the same for the whole of C20 culture. Talk about throwing the baby out with the Vartry water. 'At some point they will become incomprehensible to young people, requiring too much historical backfilling to be worth the effort' - maybe he should warn Diarmaid MacCulloch of this?

While I wouldn't read a book about McLaren, the fact that there is now an 855pp book about him reminds me of what I tried to suggest on the ILM Cure thread: that it's slightly anomalous that there are not serious historical works covering the careers of more major pop acts, as part of the overall history of culture. Dylan, Bowie, even Smiths, yes. But why isn't there a 500-page rigorously researched fully referenced history of Siouxsie and the Banshees? ... Maybe there is.

there was a magnificently sniffy letter from the author of the McLaren tome in a recent LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n06/letters

the book is presumably this long bcz it's extremely well illustrated? design and fashion are paul gorman's primary wheelhouse, including a history of beloved style mag the face, a (by no means bad and very well illustrated) book on barney bubbles, plus an oral history of the music press (uk and us) which certainly is full of handy anecdotes

he was also the ghostwriter of GOLDIE's first autobiography (which goldie has since somewhat repudiated tho this is not really gorman's fault IMO) (i am extremely close pal's with the ghostwriter of goldie's SECOND autobiography so i know everything abt this) (perhaps i shd be angling to become goldie's third and defnitive ghostwriter)

this mfer wrote pal's

That letters page (poster Neil S's link) looks a good one!

LRB 10.2.2022: ultimately not one for me, save the one long article I read first: Lethem on Lem. One of the best, most important pieces of non-fiction he's produced for some time. Great to see him filling in his relation to SF in a way he hasn't done for years.

The first half of the article on J.C. Oates is decent - the reviewer really knows her Oates (who has written 50 novels!). I daresay that Oates should be given more attention. What's quoted from her here reads well.

Inclined to agree, belatedly, with Mark S's statement that Joe Dunthorne's Diary looks like fiction as much as fact.