Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

LRB 5.1.2023.

Alan Bennett unusually bad, and often needlessly vulgar. The Queen material does, as Mark S implied, have some, limited historical / archival interest. But much of it is a reprint of something he's written before (typical of AB to republish his own material as often as possible), and his credulous attitude actually reminds me, I realised, of those "FBPE types" who would maintain that the Queen was secretly opposing Brexit or 'trolling Donald Trump'.

The quality of this diary is so low that one paragraph is spend talking about how bad the diary is while talking about his own earlier section on the Queen, which we have read 5 minutes ago.

A nadir appears when he tells us that he once told Geoffrey Palmer that he hoped to write a play beginning with lines about 'Sodomy was the bugbear. They seem to have settled at Lytham'. Perhaps there is a specific joke or pun here I don't see. As far as I can tell, it's a very standard Bennett-ism, pastiche Bennett that most of us could come up with in 30 seconds (except that I might not have expected AB to say 'sodomy' on stage, at least not in earlier decades). So Bennett is rehashing mediocre, characteristic lines from a play he never wrote, and going out of his way to tell us about them and preserve them in print, though they were barely worth writing down in the first place.

One of the biggest egos in modern letters.

Anne Enright on Toni Morrison: a potentially promising theme of reading and rereading, and some notions about reading and neurology which, while they have personal pertinence to her via her mother, draw her less helpfully into a bunch of half-baked neuro-claims (we have an app for empathy that is no longer being switched on? A lot more citations needed, from what must be a vast field of tentative research). The article then goes on to become very obnoxious.

Tom Crewe on Hornby on Dickens and Prince: a bad topic, but Crewe redeems the assignment by being properly critical, or disdainful, of Hornby, rather than indulgent. This should happen more.

James Meek on floods and building: have to hand it to Meek: again and again, for several years now, he goes to the big topics (war, energy, Brexit, farming, ecology, privatisation, housing) and tackles them head on, at a length which looks tedious but actually always turns out not really to be. He always does the same schtick, talking to councillors, businessmen, locals, people he agrees with and doesn't, and gives them a fair hearing - a scrupulous or generous interviewer. He presents data and educates the public. In this instance, oddly, his evidence gives an impression that things are less bad than one had thought.

Christopher Kelly on Roman London: obviously a rich subject, and starts off with some good fun about fake etymologues and histories - but gets oddly bogged down in a question of whether London was originally commercial or military, private or public sector. Given that the book is 573pp long, I have a suspicion that it is less obsessed with this perhaps misleading binary than the reviewer is.

Jenny Turner on Colette: unusually bad.

Still over half of this issue to go; which may be a good thing as I haven't received the next one.

They don’t like jazz because they’re threatened by its freedom, clearly

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Friday, 13 January 2023 22:09 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

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, Thursday, 2 September 2021 14:51 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^tbf this was in response to a piece on thomas tallis that i had enjoyed but which pinefox found over-technical

I remember that!

BTW I was going to say: the LRB publishes quite regularly (not necessarily in a way I like much) on pop music, and I suspect that the simplest way for Mark S to be in it would be to pitch a straight review / article on rock and / or rockwriting.

On the other hand, I agree with the point that someone has made in the past, that it is strangely light on film. I don't mean that At The Movies is bad (as everyone but me thinks), but that the paper carries almost no other writing about film - reviews of books on directors, etc - unless you count occasional David Thomson meditations which are always welcome.

my read on this is somewhat coloured by a rejection i got many years ago -- an idea for a piece on rock-writing! -- which was less obviously allergic the response to the free jazz idea (tho it slightly overlapped) and more like "we would love to run more stuff like this but our hands are tied! also we are afraid of you, like the inhabitants of a small fishing village as a fleet of pirates sail past on the horizon!"

anyway tbh i think they got over this fear -- perhaps since mary-kay w retired? certainly i took her to be the one tying their hands lol -- and now they routinely do publish pieces on music, yes (an odd selection IMO, they shd hire me as CONSULTANT EDITOR on this territory)

You should be the one to publish an LRB review of SURRENDER, by Bono, including a reassessment of their superb double soundtrack LP RATTLE & HUM.

that's right!

LRB 5.1.2023.

Paul Taylor on 'Chat GPT': some kind of AI writing program that I have heard of people using. I understand that there are important issues here, but I don't comprehend the article itself in its description of the program.

Fraser MacDonald on lighting fires: a person with manual skills I will never have.

Tim Parks on author Manzoni: something I knew nothing about, fair play, he explains it as straightforwardly as he can - a good thing for such an article to do.

Linda Colley on Convicts: again well balanced and informative.

Michael Dillon on Uyghurs in China: I have heard of this issue before, never knew anything about it, now I do, a bit. I like, again, the way the article is factual and cautious in its assertions. He doesn't bother with grandstanding, rhetoric, opinion, he just reports what we know, or what it seems reasonable to say is known. I increasingly want more writing to be like this.

I quite like how when there is a big prominent novel out, the LRB turns to its old hand Christian Lorentzen. He gives us a lot of information about the two Cormac McCarthy novels. He makes them sound bad without saying they're bad. I note that McCarthy's verbless sentences recall late DeLillo's. Both strike me as a somewhat complacent way of writing.

Paul Mendez on George Michael slightly reminds me how much I like some of GM's songs, though really it's Wham! not the solo material for me. It's quite good that the author occasionally makes factual corrections to the reviewed text, though he doesn't challenge Tracey Emin's reported statement that the 1980s were 'one of the most demoralising, most depressing times we'd ever had for young people in British history'. Depends what you mean by 'one of' and 'times' perhaps. It is reasonable to say that the 1340s were even more depressing.

Blake Morrison is somewhat informative about Jon Fosse's work which sounds very tedious and bad.

I think that Raban used to write for the LRB. RIP.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/18/jonathan-raban-travel-writer-and-novelist-dies-aged-80

Actually a significant writer, wrote a number of imaginative non-fiction books, SOFT CITY among them.

Really sorry to hear of Raban's death. I loved his travel writing and read pretty much all of them in the early 00s. He's very much of the 'lone male, running from something' school of travel but he writes beautifully, particularly about being on (or near) water. I've read *Coasting*, his book about circumnavigating Britain in a boat, 5 or 6 times.

Just recalling a section of (I think) *Hunting Mr Heartbreak* where he sets up home in a shack on the shores of a lake in the American midwest and makes some extra money writing book reviews for the LRB. He talks about how demanding it is as a job, particularly when one is on the move; how he'd have to order all of a writer's previous books and have them sent in a parcel to a forwarded address and never be sure if they'd arrive etc.

COASTING sounds like one of the most interesting.

And amusing that he'd have to read *all of a writer's previous books*!

Fraser MacDonald on lighting fires

This was a highlight of the issue for me. Made me wish I had a wood-burning stove.

enjoyed catherine nicholson's review of katherine rundell's book abt john donne -- as much as anything bcz i learned useable biographical detail (for a while he was a pirate!) abt my dad's favourite poet next to mallarmé

writing this down slightly makes me realise my bond w/my dad -- we were close but didn't entirely get one another -- was possibly the mutual confoundment of being attracted to the cryptic in otherwise quite difft things lol

oh well rip dad and rave on john donne :)

also just realised rundell does the LRB nature pieces which everyone admires and which i seem always to have put on one side for another time -- so this review will presumably fall into pf's mild disapproval zone (LRB paying nice attention to an LRB contributor) but i will hold my ground!

Well observed Mark S.

Haven't reached the Donne yet, I have almost that entire issue to read, but yes I would find that suspect.

I always thought that Rundell's articles would be gathered into a book (as they were), which would be bought by the same people who had owned the LRBs they'd appeared in in the first place. Maybe you should become one of those people.

I read a bit of Donne in my very halting attempt on Renaissance poetry in 2021. He was about the best of the lot that I read, his work much closer than others to real life as I recognise it.

Not enough discussion of that one rather unpleasant Donne poem where he’s telling a mate how ugly his gf is, that has the line “she hath yet the anagram of a good face” — which is an incredible putdown. & later on there’s a line about how even dildos don’t want to touch her

xxp: that piece went into mild criticisms of the book, or so I felt. I found it all really informative about a poet I quite like but don't know much about. Very striking how his sermons would draw crowds.

crowds so large ppl were at risk of being crushed!

perhaps they were there to see if he said "jesus is like a grand shag! also take my gf! please!"

The Holy Sonnets are all-time, Donne a favorite of mine, too.

LRB 19.1.2023.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on so-called 'Chips' Channon - no-one ever talks about how he gained this ridiculous name - adding to the publicity around this figure over the last year or so. Very long, very indulgent, on a character utterly odious and malicious, who was also a Nazi. The work is edited by a journalist who has made vile false allegations that socialists support Nazi policies: perhaps he got the idea from these diaries.

It's true that an accurate view of the world requires bad news, and an understanding of bad and nasty things - privatization, nuclear conflict, climate change. Often the LRB brings us those. But this is vice with no point and no lesson. Channon wasn't even causally significant, like Pinochet, Mussolini or Thatcher. In a world of finite space and coverage, there is no justification for spreading his foulness over so many pages.

I'm only part way into Iain Sinclair on sewers, but seems to me that this is a mismatch of author and subject. Sewers are important, technical, unpleasant. They don't have much to do with ley lines, 1960s poets, Allen Ginsberg at the Roundhouse. They're not illuminated by saying 'All the mysteries of London now tend towards Barking Creek' and 'I wonder about the psychic damage being inflicted on London as a living organism'. Actually London isn't a living organism (it contains many), and doesn't, itself, have a psyche that could be damaged.

We might well benefit from someone telling us the facts about sewers, but Sinclair's elliptical approach isn't going to tell us the facts very economically per page.

It's curious that he talks so much of the danger of London being swamped by sewage - a phenomenon that actually isn't very apparent. London must have been much dirtier in 1850 (when streets were full of manure) or 1850 (when skies were full of smog) than it is now.

Still, I have a long way to go yet in this outsized article. Maybe it changes.

The opening line of that sewer piece, meant to give some sense of scale, was meaningless to anyone not a Londoner, so I skipped it. Already find Sinclair a bit of a pain, so this was not hard.

re chips channon: i googled around a bit to uncover the "chips" backstory and it seems to be that when was at christ church as a student he palled around for a while with a lad everyone knew as "fish". this is often how lasting nicknames work so it may well be true but it seems of a piece with his general contribution to world history (negligeable bordering on risible)

i first encountered the name when christopher hitchens would drop it into his 80s essays abt the abdication the the royals -- which tells its own story, i guess, that channon was an unbridled gossip full of spiteful passion, and that for journalists (of every politics tbh) that's always a godsend. wheatcroft does touch on this: that what probably placed him in front of people was his relatively unbuttoned diary style in the 50s and 60s, still a very buttoned-up time (compared e.g. to example harold nicolson for example, also mentioned but deprecated as timidly establishment). probably a better focus at this late date for the review might have been the pros and cons of relying on and valorising such sources for the first draft of history (and how the sources in question then end up in the second and third drafts despite being no more than once-useful blabbermouths).

i suppose i would also maintain -- as i now and then have also done with alan bennett -- that diarists are useful *bcz* of the ego that drives them rather than despite: malice and a sense of the ridiculous don't really have a politics of their own, and can act as a filter against whatever the fashionably earnest tide of collective seriousness at a given moment is picking and choosing as that which matters and doesn't. but once deployed it's hard to wash them back out again i guess, and in the long run it seems to enable the heffers (and the hitchenses) of the world much more than is seemly…

Re: 'Chips', you do learn quite a bit about how the English upper classes carried on, and these are the people on the losing side in their own time as well. It's a piece of history with some detail. The picture of how women were viewed/what they did in relationships seemed quite interesting. And you needn't enable Heffer by just reading this review and not the book in question. Surely that's the point of the LRB, you are highly unlikely to buy most of what's reviewed.

Mark S: nothing against diaries as such, whatever. Diaries can surely be good, useful, informative, and more.

This extremely long diary just happens to be by a foul individual.

probably a better focus at this late date for the review might have been the pros and cons of relying on and valorising such sources for the first draft of history (and how the sources in question then end up in the second and third drafts despite being no more than once-useful blabbermouths).

Good argument. You should write that.

"The opening line of that sewer piece, meant to give some sense of scale, was meaningless to anyone not a Londoner"

Looking again: I didn't especially understand it myself, but the point of the line seems to be not scale but gradient: the apple would go from A to B because A is higher than B, whatever the distance between those points.

But thus far in what I've read, IS hasn't really explained much about actual sewers.

I wrote: "London must have been much dirtier in 1850 (when streets were full of manure) or 1850 (when skies were full of smog) than it is now."

The second date was meant to be 1950.

his essays on london always arrived a wee bit in the form of "other ppl and their unlearned requirements, pshaw, those of us in the know scry very different energies" (at which point it veers off into tales of john dee or whatever)

i don't much mind this -- you hire sinclair bcz you want to hear from a guy who thinks london has a psyche distinct from (tho interconnected with) the aggregate of the psyches of those who live in it (for example it encompasses the psyches of all those who no longer live in it)

nevertheless the thing abt this essay is that at root it is basically a local beef abt the bins disguised as something more mystically penetrating: and it does not quite say -- when he's e.g. talking abt "wild swimmers" on the beach at hastings -- that *he* is one of the ppl who made the move from his beloved hackney (which he is now bored with) to hastings, where he now resides. when i visit my sister in hastings, she has pointed out the building he lives in, a tall maritime art-deco pile of flats right on the sea-front, and thus overlooking the beach and, well, the outflow of all the local sewers (tho surely not of the london sewers)

there's a real issue here and no doubt there is a kind of hubris about tackling it without really talking about it clearly in public -- which is part of his implication i think -- but i don't feel that he is talking about it clearly in public either! he's weaving a spell of "oh those silly londoners and their unspoken obsession with drains, now if we hark back to gog and magog… "

ps seaside swimmers are not "wild" swimmers, i don't care who says they are

I think that he wrote about Hastings - and acquiring this home there? - in a book that I own but have not read, DINING ON STONES, which has said building on the front cover.

I am not sure whether he has actually left London, though. I have been, only about 9 months ago, to the square where he lives or lived - it looks incredibly desirable and expensive now, though may not have been 50 years ago. Don't think it would be financially wise to sell that property unless you were moving somewhere possibly even more ambitious than ... Hastings.

So my sense is that maybe he owns two homes. Possibly it is unseemly even to speculate about this.

It now strikes me that when Mark S talks about people moving from their beloved Hackney to new locations on the coast, he is engaging in mildly sublimated autobiography.

i should write a diary and be the chips channon of 2080

- it looks incredibly desirable and expensive now, though may not have been 50 years ago.

Seem to recall in one of his books he lets slip that his father gave him the money for the house in Hackney in the 70s.

This article https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n02/deborah-friedell/everyone-is-terribly-kind is a classic example of not saying anything at all about the two books under review, as far as I can see.

The opening line of that sewer piece, meant to give some sense of scale, was meaningless to anyone not a Londoner, so I skipped it. Already find Sinclair a bit of a pain, so this was not hard.

I find Sinclair's fiction undreadable but when he's at his best (*Lights Out* *London Orbital* *Edge of the Orison*) his non-fiction is utterly compelling. Fwiw - and this is partly ageist generalising - I think he's part of a herd of critics who seem to be allowed to roam where they please in the pages of the LRB.

Essentially agree with Chinaski.

I think Sinclair a great writer, one of the most gifted and important of his generation. There is on that basis a case for saying that the LRB, or whoever, should let him write what he likes, as it will be in some sense important or worthwhile (but I won't persuade anyone of that case, and they do it for Colm Toibin and he mostly writes rubbish).

But Chinaski is dead right: Sinclair's *fictional* imagination is clotted, distorted, awkward, doesn't work for me. The value is in the non-fiction. But the non-fiction has its flaws, as people justly say - the repetition, predictable views, conservatism, cliqueishness, etc.

Michael Wood on Rimbaud is just terrific. Kind of a counterpart with the 'Chips' piece lol.

I love some of sinclair's earlier writing, i even managed to digest (somewhat) and enjoy two of his novels, downriver and radon daughters. i do wonder what i'd make of them now - but either way i find the mad sparking electricity of his earlier prose entirely absent from these lrb pieces.

DOWNRIVER for me was a rather embarrassing, though ambitious and epic, effort in its grand guignol mode ... very similar to Salman Rushdie of all people. Basically I think I'd say IS does not do satire well. Problems of tone.

I suspect that others of his novels are less satirical, more modernist and minimal, and it might actually work better.

I remembered that one highlight of the Channon article is Wheatcroft's giving repeated lessons to Heffer about basic errors in the footnotes: 'this is clearly a reference to Keats's "Ode to Autumn"'. That was worthwhile.

"I love some of sinclair's earlier writing, i even managed to digest (somewhat) and enjoy two of his novels, downriver and radon daughters."

Same here. I got into him bcz of former Wire contributor Ben Watson's writing on him.

Then I started reading his pieces published in the LRB and interest just died. Discourse around psychogeography didn't help.

London Orbital is a masterpiece, and Sinclair's prose matches the Quixotic nature of the endeavour. I think he has suffered from diminishing returns ever since, but I do enjoy his shorter pieces in the LRB, even if he probably could do with a firmer editor.

Sinclair remains the only writer to ever cancel an interview with me at the last minute due to "a dodgy prawn curry" and for that alone I'll always like him

Having finished Sinclair on the sewer, I can state that a relative strength is that it's not as long as I feared it would be. He doesn't outstay his welcome.

Its main weakness is that it doesn't really stick to the topic of the sewer, and doesn't suggest that IS has really learned the salient facts about the sewer, let alone how best to convey them to us, an audience who don't already know them.

To put it in words, not just screenshots:

Very happy to say I have joined the London Review of Books (@LRB) as Head of Audience.

This new role is about imagining how the LRB can and should exist on the internet, from https://t.co/DQwHpzGRuu to email, Twitter, Instagram & beyond

— Jay Owens (@hautepop) January 25, 2023

@hautepop reading my old ilx posts abt this topic 👍🏽

this is an interesting development bcz i know her as a writer and (very good, clear, smart) analyst of trends but i'm assuming she's in an editorial-restructuring-as-comms type of role here?

anyway we shall see

Her piece on AI as aid to novel writing last year was a pretty brilliant look at how things might change and stay the same.

Oh no

swore off reading any more Prince Harry stuff but this Andrew O’Hagan review is so good! https://t.co/j71IpZqkTc

— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) January 26, 2023