London Review of Books

to read Sheila Fitzpatrick's essay on the centenary of the Russian Revolution/

iirc SPs conclusions that there isn't much enthusiasm for the Russian revolution or its ideas was kinda...off to me, especially given what has been happening post-Latin America, then onto Sanders/Corbyn and some of the fierce counters from the right (and er Bannon being a fan of Lenin, although that's probably a troll, even so..)

Iain Sinclair is a pain in the hole. Only stuff of his I have enjoyed were the book-scout bits in White Chapel Scarlet Tracings or whatever it was. Psychogeography has produced a vast amount of bad writing, probably second only to the Beats.

simplicius simplicissimus is very good!

I really like Iain Sinclair but I think his window, by design, due to the nature of his obsessions, was relatively narrow - from Lights Out to Edge of the Orison (the fiction is a different beast). I think I'm also fine with thinking him a bit of a charlatan.

That's a good statement Chinaski!

re: fiction: my sense is that he isn't really cut out for it. He is good at writing 'fact that becomes fictional', but bad when he does 'fiction based on fact'.

Opened the new issue, ie with Sinclair. Seems surprisingly uninteresting.

i have done a 180 on the lrb. the last few issues have been excellent. so many highlights! michael wood on fritz lang. peter green on ancient greece.

nyrb on the other hand. does anybody actually read those tomasky articles on trump? maybe it's the change in editorship, but the quality feels wildly variable all of a sudden.

I saw Wood give that lecture at the British Museum. It felt like very below-par Wood, worryingly wayward by his standards. But I think it comes across a bit better in print. The same was true of Sinclair's 'Last London'.

it could have been better. he never really ties together the big heat and mabuse the way he says he wants to. but it was fascinating to me all the same.

The long article on the Cadbury's Somerville plant was excellent - both incredibly sad and worrying but with these occasional flashes of unintentional comedy. "We watched the last Crunchie come off the production line" or whatever.

I didn't get much out of that piece on Lang. Like Wood synthesized a lot of readings to...I'm not sure what point. Did remind me that I must read someting by Kraucauer.

I loved Jenny Turner's piece on Elsa Morante - great literary journalism on a writer whose work I love.

krakauer generally a let-down in my experience -- tho i do remember liking his piece on the tiller girls

i think LRB has had some terrific stuff this year, I was going to do a giant post on all the good stuff (and then remembered i have an actual large writing project which is already three months past deadline)

The long article on the Cadbury's Somerville plant was excellent - both incredibly sad and worrying but with these occasional flashes of unintentional comedy. "We watched the last Crunchie come off the production line" or whatever.

― Matt DC, Saturday, 29 April 2017 09:02 (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

James Meeks is the lrb writer I will always make sure to read. The long article about social housing from about three years ago was his best I think.

krakauer generally a let-down in my experience -- tho i do remember liking his piece on the tiller girls

Thought you liked him - maybe I'm mis-remembering you talking him up a couple of years ago (?)

They're doing the free subscription thing again, so the first person who wants one can have one: just let me know. it says you can't have been a subscriber before to qualify.

Haven't finished yet, but this is quite powerful so far.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n18/tom-crewe/here-was-a-plague

I don't know that we need another trawl through the horror of Plath's life, but there's no doubting this was luridly compelling:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n24/joanna-biggs/im-an-intelligence

I was reading that yesterday - and I would've avoided it because I know of the new details this is providing (namely Ted's physical assault, and Sylvia's discovery of letters to Assia and her reaction - think this one is new), but then again I wanted to see how this read after I engaged with Plath's work this year (went on a run of Letters Home, Bell Jar and of course the Complete Poems). Also the writer did input details of her own life in it, which (post-Janet Malcolm) every commentator of Plath should do now. A law should be passed.

I found the autobiographical elements (almost intentionally?) clumsy - an unnecessary, first-draft, framework that could easily have been removed. Malcolm's is still the definitive account for me.

Awful article!

James Wolcott on Saul Bellow

:( :( >:( >:(

(i haven't read it yet)

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n02/james-wolcott/the-unstoppable-upward

tag yrselves, i'm sister jane

(the bit where bellow hard-slaps a girlfriend at a meal lots of ppl are at? i want to do this to wolcott for his adjectives)

single good line is alfred kazin's, lol at the trio of ghastly literary fail/fakesons bellow accrued: james fkn wood, leon fkn wieseltier, martin fkn amis

We're all sister Jane.

Loved the Nobel dinner!

i think it's the basis of the film festen :0

I never got around to seeing this film about a wife who is married to a recipient of the Nobel in lit. Has some echoes though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wife_(2017_film)

reading the bellow article now - didn’t realise it was for the second volume of the zachary leader biog. his biog of k amis was monumentally tedious and long-winded and it sounds like james wolcott suffered similarly here.

feels like he aims for academic exhaustiveness which does not aid or prioritise insight (his amis insight was at best leaden at worst just tone deaf and rong). but it’s not clear which market he’s going for - the bookshop window or the academic $$$, either in price or style.

the perfect opposite example of this being chesterton’s wonderful short biog of browning. not much use as an academic aid to triangulating the exact social, career and geographical grid reference of the subject at any given time tho i guess.

oh god it’s all coming back reading this. his use of biographical detail to explain fictional context, not in itself an unreasonable thing to do, is incredibly hamfisted. almost denudes the notion of imaginative fiction of any worth whatsoever.

since almost any brief acquaintance with bellow and those round him makes you think "these are bad ppl and they shd feel bad", this seems a v unhelpful approach

disclaimer: i have read no bellow and judge him entirely thru the lens of the self-promotional stanning of martin amis

wow, he went to agent andrew wylie (“the jackal”), jilting his former female agent. this is interesting ofc because Mamis did the same thing to Pat Kavanagh triggering that split with her husband Julian Barnes. what a tedious shitshow.

as wolcott says “what was it with this guys?”

since almost any brief acquaintance with bellow and those round him makes you think "these are bad ppl and they shd feel bad", this seems a v unhelpful approach

disclaimer: i have read no bellow

^
This is entertaining.

I think I have to agree with it.

(I have read one Bellow - DANGLING MAN)

g00blar to thread?

I have read a lot of Bellow, but he was still a colossal shit

To be fair I don't think anyone who's read Bellow's books could be surprised to learn he was a bit of a jerk in real life. It's not like his book persona is that different. The Wolcott piece was entertaining, and it did a nice job of skimming some juicy bits from a super-long bio which I'm sure I'll never read but I do think he overrates Ravelstein quite a bit. By the logic of the piece, it had to be some kind of masterpiece to prove the doubters wrong, but I don't think it would convince anyone who wasn't already predisposed to like late-period Bellow.

These biographies never leave much space for making a case for the fiction (why are we reading this biog in the first place?) I guess you wouldn't get to it unless you liked a lot of the fiction already but for someone reading a long form review like that all you get is some entertainment over gossip -- and reading something for a laugh is as fine a reason as any. Just noting on the gap between that and the imagined importance of it beyond well er, this guy wrote some nice sentences and some people in Sweden gave him a prize for it. Oh, and he sold a lot of books once.

Of course the review might have cut that stuff out but it doesn't look like it.

they should just cut all of wolcott's adjectives out, it wd improve his writing by a million percent

also they shd put drawing pin on his chair

Yeah, I've read a fair share of his stuff and am tempted to say "I'm shocked, shocked to find out that people are saying bad things about him." In fact there was an interesting takedown I came across whilst perusing James Atlas bio a year or so ago, let me see if I can find it.

Ah, yes, here it is: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/another-rare-visit-with-noah-danzig/

Here's some background on that:

14. Last fanciful plot point was perhaps Bellow's dig at Kramer's well known homophobia.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 8, 2014

Aargh, I wanted to link to the whole thread, not that particular post but anyway

1. A Twitter Essay on Saul Bellow, Hilton Kramer, Joseph Epstein & the Perils of the Roman à clef (for @BrentNYT & @matthunte)

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 8, 2014

He managed to convince himself and others that he was a diffident, reclusive artist even as he sat for journalists and television commentators; nearly every interview with Bellow—and there were many over the years—began by claiming that he granted few interviews. Many years later, in a malicious story entitled “Another Rare Visit with Noah Danzig,” Joseph Epstein described a long interview with a fictionalized Bellow, noting that “over the years there would be no fewer than 235 such ‘rare visits’ in print.” Epstein scarcely exaggerated. Bellow ignored most letters requesting interviews, claiming not to have received them, but he was gregarious and loved to discourse on his favorite subjects to just about anyone who would listen. In the sixties, he gave sixteen interviews; in the seventies, he gave even more.

That Epstein piece is hilarious. I don't know if it captures Bellow exactly or not, but it definitely captures someone.

I read this Bellow article. I suppose it zips along but I don't like it or trust it much.

He is right, though, to point to the bizarreness and wrongness of Bellow as 'literary father'. Though did Wood really buy into that (as Amis did), or was he more simply someone who admired Bellow's writing? Which would be OK as far as it goes.

I think I agree with xyz about the ultimate triviality of it.

But this is a relatively enjoyable issue of the LRB.

Would love to read this relatively enjoyable issue of the LRB but I subscribed three weeks ago and have received nothing but a barrage of emails telling me what's in the issues they haven't sent me and how great the LRB is.

tom ime if you get in touch with their subs dep you will immediately receive three copies of every issue you’ve missed. if that helps.

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?, Katrina Marçal. In the mood for a good whodunnit.

argh wrong thread

tbh i have rock scribewars* beef against wolcott and i think his writing is annoying and terrible

*©TEwing on this very site once upon a time very long ago