London Review of Books

Empson writing about things I actually already know about: comprehensible and fun in the way we all like.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n15/william-empson/the-ultimate-novel

(that is, I understand him here - maybe when I don't understand him it's partly because I just don't know the field.)

"Parodies are appreciative criticisms in this sense, and much of Proust reads like the work of a superb appreciative critic upon a novel which has unfortunately not survived."

p249 of 7ToA as made available here: https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.215758/2015.215758.Seven-Types_djvu.txt

also this version has an index, though the page numbers may not be right for yr edition

Wish I could read the whole review. Never thought of Ulysses as sad, though, not even comic-sad.

I can't disagree with that.

I did make the effort to read the whole 2-part review online; my recollection is that it only initially pretends to be a review and then becomes a 20,000-word Empson statement on Ulysses, offering a bizarre biographical and sexual reading. In fact I think this material may appear again in Empson's USING BIOGRAPHY.

I gave up on that Lockwood piece halfway through - it seems I'm not as Extremely Online as she is, or not in the same way, so many of the points raised were things I couldn't identify with and others were things I couldn't see why she was so worried about. I understand the diffuseness is part of the deal, but I dunno.

lol now you've amde it a competition i'm going to have to read it

I liked the Lockwood piece. I’m also not as plugged in as she is, I only got a Twitter account this year, but I could relate a bit to the evocation of online meme culture, even via the little bit that filters into ILX.

the lockwood piece is not for me

i think she's a brilliant writer but pretty much only when she's not writing about the internet

see: her poems that are sorta internet jokes vs. her poems that aren't related to the internet at all

in an irritating sort of way way i feel this discussion is proving my point.

also

Attn: Subscribers. Due to a machine breakdown at our fulfilment house last week some issues of 41/5 were a little late going out. If you haven't had your copy yet it should be with you in the next day or so though (in the UK). Sorry about that and thank you for your patience! pic.twitter.com/uYUAmoelPL

— London Review of Books (@LRB) March 5, 2019

They're still sending me emails every other day, even though I cancelled my subscription and twice asked them to remove me from their email list.

Isn't there an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email?

I liked the Lockwood piece a lot - the internet makes you smarter, but it also pulverizes your brain.

Possibly, I've never reached the bottom of one of their emails I usually delete them automatically.

Yeah, I am online-clueless, but that Lockwood piece was such a pleasure sentence by sentence that I didn't care.

carry on at this rate Tom you’ll get your first LRB in a couple of weeks despite cancelling and them having the wrong address. cue huge dumper truck piled high with perry anderson screeds pulling up outside your Palais de Tom D.

Yes, I, like Tom D and Fizzles, quite often have trouble obtaining my copy.

Fizzles, how is the discussion proving your point?

i felt the split of intelligent, literary and well read people itt on the recent lockwood piece indicated that it was generating judgment about approach and style in a way that say a standard highly authoritative piece can preclude. i think this is a good thing.

the reason i felt it was a bit cheeky or unhelpful to say this is there probably can be a bit of a slippery slope that says “if it’s controversial it must be good” which wouldn’t be my intention to recommend.

i do think experimenting with new methods to tackle, represent and analyse the contemporary world is a valuable thing the lrb can do, and that this was doing that.

I also felt that Lockwood’s more conventional piece on Cusk *was* good, and unconventional in its manner, and more representative of the mode described above, enabling the personal world of the writer to be present as part of the essay or analysis.

speaking as editor of wire long ago i strongly felt it was right and proper that at least some of the coverage also took experimental* form: esp as (A) the wire is/is a mag dedicated to the understanding and exploration of, among other things, the experimental, and (B) too much writing abt the avant garde is bad not good bcz the formal underpinnings and conventions of the writing run counter to the the formal underpinnings and conventions of the cap-E Experimental. and this is a clash that’s under-addressed bcz the unspoken demands of quality in the writing bleed back into how readers come to understand the avant garde. hence the wire is a journal that covers the avant-garde but almost never in any sense an avant-garde publication

the problem being that editors who can judge both are far and few between if they exist at all, and what you actually tend to get — as you get in the LRB, as we’ve established — is a formal subdivision within the magazine between the “experimental” (which PF is calling “self-indulgent” and the LRB largely refers to as “poetry”) (or “new short story by john lanchester”) so that you don’t read both sections as if they have purchase on one another.

AND MAYBE THEY DON’T, bcz they are not treated as if they ought to. So I suppose we are exploring the question “how would things work if they were so treated, and in fact how would we even bring this about, with the tools to hand as we understand them?”)

adding: it suddenly occurred to me as I was writing this that — since one of the consequences of major shifts in information delivery, viz the arrival of the book, the arrival of television, the arrival of twitter, is significant traumatic estrangement between generations* — that the function of editing and sub-editing for “quality” is a highly routinised management of potential readership-trauma lol, and that this is both good not bad and bad not good…

*arrival of the book —> 30 years war inc. english civil war, among other wars, invasions, colonisations, erasures and worse

the tricia internet piece is one of my favourite pieces of writing in years, it truly spoke to my experience lol

(or “new short story by john lanchester”

i would like to make it clear to the committee that this is a mode i in no way endorse as “a method for tackling the contemporary conjuncture”.

I see there is a new podcast, called The State of... This month features John Lanchester, discussing 'the internet'.

fizzles's cunning plan proceeds apace

soon lanchester will be the only mode. lanchester on bloby the logos.

i saw there was an entire f’ing lrb podcast interview with lanchester about “the wall”, by david runciman, someone who keeps nosediving further and further down in my estimation (from a fairly high point i should add - i used to find him very useful on politics and now feel pretty much everything he says is suspect or in some way bogus). i couldn’t bring myself to listen to it.

i mean i think the thing is they very evidently ARE trying to address the "contemporary conjuncture” issue via lanchester :((((((((((((((

i think the o'hagan/grenfell piece also fell into this zone (and also that in the past he's been pointed at "conjuncture" stuff with varying levels of result: bitcoin, assange, a piece on farming many years ago which i remember liking, a piece on "the disappeared" in ref fred west (bcz i think he knew a victim or else someone who vanished who may have been a victim), and (again a piece i felt i liked at the time) something on kids and cruelty after the bulger case...

I see there is a new podcast, called The State of... This month features John Lanchester, discussing 'the internet'.

Patricia Lockwood's on it too!

Her recent piece on Lucia Berlin was also excellent: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n23/patricia-lockwood/sex-on-the-roof

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dwd6ZfJU8AA9lmg.jpg

'Rău, rău!' Patricia kept shouting

I am sad that you haven't listened to the podcast, Fizzles. There was a good bit in which JL was talking about (NB DODGY SUMMATION OF POINT FOLLOWS) how fo course he knew all this unnecessary detail about the world as depicted in his fiction, but the skill was to leave so much of it out; I enjoyed the thought of you spluttering at that.

speaking as editor of wire long ago i strongly felt it was right and proper that at least some of the coverage also took experimental* form: esp as (A) the wire is/is a mag dedicated to the understanding and exploration of, among other things, the experimental, and (B) too much writing abt the avant garde is bad not good bcz the formal underpinnings and conventions of the writing run counter to the the formal underpinnings and conventions of the cap-E Experimental. and this is a clash that’s under-addressed bcz the unspoken demands of quality in the writing bleed back into how readers come to understand the avant garde. hence the wire is a journal that covers the avant-garde but almost never in any sense an avant-garde publication

It strikes me that with whatever we might call experimental music - possibly experimental literature, too - there's probably more of a demand from readers to have things explained via translation into a non-experimental language, i.e. ppl feel they're not "getting it", or not fully anyway, and tend towards conventional, accessible explainers more than they would if you're writing about Stax or whatever. Which I get must be frustrating for initiates.

I really enjoyed that Berlin piece - it felt weirdly far from the usual LRB mode - crossed over into a personal enthusiasm* that almost felt _gauche_ by the conventions of English literary journalism. This is good not bad - it's one of the few pieces in there that actually made me pay attention and want to read someone.

I liked her internet piece. I don't know why you'd pair her with Lanchester to talk about the web, she just seems brilliantly far ahead of that plodder both in understanding and ability to describe.

*not to be confused with slightly stiff formal anecdote about the circs in which you first read an author.

more of a demand from readers to have things explained via translation into a non-experimental language

this is true, for sure -- and i have no beef with writing that genuinely works towards this… but a lot of the so-called translation i was reacting against was stuff basically checking the avant-garde item off on a general list of the things avant-gardism is Held To Be, politically or futurologically or whatever. so it wasn't really translation at all, but projection, via the micro-medium of shunting around an artist's promo phrases and self-description on a fuzzyfelt board to produce the needed correlation

(actually fuzzyfelt is too sweet a word but i have to get to work lol)

On Empson, I think one mode of his difficulty is down to a few things that have come up above:

a) assuming that the reader knows what he's talking about
b) something like amazingly confident anti-scholarship - just reading half of someone's entry in the DNB and deciding to have a crack at historical/biographical reading based on that and guesswork.
d) Using that casual, engaging style to present the above (along with his unusual personal sensibility) as completely obvious, just something straightforward that people happen to have missed

I'd say one of his great virtues is being magnificently wrong. Like you're in the middle of this baffling, bluffing, brilliant trick, your miles from where any conventional critic would have landed you (and it's all being presented as 'well, this is just common sense') and you have to think or argue your way out of it for yourself.

(He's not always like this of course - sometimes just brilliant)

Fizzles:

I share your view of Runciman.

I haven't actually read the Lockwood internet article - I seem to have filed that issue away having only managed the first couple of paras. My thoughts on Lockwood were more re: her earlier LRB essays.

So again, I don't share others' enthusiasm for those. The line about writers looking like murderers I find quite a good example of something that is bad and irritating about her.

I'm afraid I also disagree with your statement that the thread has proved your point, basically for the reason you give yourself:

the reason i felt it was a bit cheeky or unhelpful to say this is there probably can be a bit of a slippery slope that says “if it’s controversial it must be good” which wouldn’t be my intention to recommend.

I respect the case here about Empson, which is clearly founded on great knowledge of him as a writer. What I am getting at with him is not so much whether his arguments are right or wrong, but more simply that he can be clotted and snarled up. I'm happy to read his controversial bold arguments, as long as they are simply clear enough to follow rather than a vast para of involution on something whose identity I never knew about in the first place.

I find it quite likely that SEVEN TYPES is more clotted than much later work.

The line about writers looking like murderers I find quite a good example of something that is bad and irritating about her.

otm

What I am getting at with him is not so much whether his arguments are right or wrong, but more simply that he can be clotted and snarled up

true, point taken - it eases off laater on, but 7 Types and The Structure of Complex Words both have that logic-problem tangledness that I do find fun, but at some point it turns into "no, you've lost me there"

I have owned SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL for years but I have never really been able to make sense of Empson's idea of pastoral. It does not seem to have anything to do with pastoral literature and art as I have experienced it.

"in a sense there is nothing that is not a pie" — william empson

I have owned SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL for years but I have never really been able to make sense of Empson's idea of pastoral. It does not seem to have anything to do with pastoral literature and art as I have experienced it.

THIS IS THE CORRECT WAY TO DO WRITING in my extremely under-commissioned opinion

The line about writers looking like murderers I find quite a good example of something that is bad and irritating about her.

Isn't it self-evident that most writers are kinda unhinged in some way - she is just taking it one level up with that remark.

And on twitter one of the memes that takes off is the "please run me over" one. Readers are begging to be killed by writers. Its cool.

I finally received the new issue.

David Bromwich seems less bad than usual.

Isn't it self-evident that most writers are kinda unhinged in some way - she is just taking it one level up with that remark.

thanks for explaining it, it still isn't good

it made me laugh \o/

i really liked Christopher Clark's recent piece on the revolutions of 1848. it probably falls into Fizzles' "August structural rightness but so what" mode but still

il liked discovering that the a in a.r.ammons stands for archie :)

Notes:

1: I was wrong to say that Bromwich was OK. The article turned into a combination of dull personal anecdote and nasty, unfounded attack on people he perceives as less sensibly centrist than himself. If it was a UK article it would probably be telling us that Tom Watson or Jess Phillips was the Labour Party's best hope.

2: Clark on 1848 OK - informative maybe about something I really know little about. The one memorable aspect of it I suppose was its tendency to make things contemporary by comparing 1848 to Arab Spring, newspapers to social media, etc.

3: Still reading Ammons article, don't like it at all - the bit I had got up to was the worst kind of indulgence that the LRB (and others) gives to aimless writing. I don't know Ammons himself at all and don't comment on him.

when does the aimless writing begin in the ammons piece? (i too am only a short way into it, i haven't taken against it yet)

For me, the worst bit yet is the para starting 'In the past' on the 2nd page.

'I write this to be writing' - good for him, maybe, but not necessarily worthwhile to anyone else.