Book Reviews? LRB vs the failing New York Review of Books vs ... ?

shorter me above, this multipart jeet heer thread lol (which i hadn't read when i posted):

1. So, this letter on behalf of Ian Buruma raises an interesting question but doesn't persuade because it fails to grapple with why Buruma was actually fired (or perhaps forced to quit). https://t.co/4c0ymp9BLu

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) September 26, 2018

here's the silvers/epstein "grenade" cover i mentioned (ie not a grenade but a molotov cocktail, and 1967 not 1968):
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DoBlT9WX0AA6T28.jpg

good issue! (i have not read it as an issue)

alfred brendel and marina warner are the names on there that cut me the most in case anyone's keeping score

did brendel say something other than signing the letter?

the only independent comment i've spotted so far from a signer -- not that i've been looking very hard -- was joyce carol oates on twitter going in HARD abt how bad the JG essay is

(in fact, having done that, she also goes on to say this will blow over -- like remnick/bannon -- bcz no lasting harm done and later, when proved wrong, to lament that it's too harsh sacking IB for just a single blunder)

i did not previously have a fully formed opinion of joyce carol oates -- prolific! enjoys boxing! -- but her twitter has convinced me that she is Bad

It is not too harsh firing someone for a single blunder when that blunder completely undermines a leader’s ability to lead their staff, as I’m certain happened here. I think that’s what the letter’s signatories might not be sensitive to. That trust won’t come back and the organization would sink slowly if Buruma didn’t exit quickly.

Enraging dipshit thread from NYRB signatory Harry Shearer below this tweet

If you're designated a "sexually violent predator", does that mean you can't hang around kids and feed them Jell-O any more? #AskingForAFriend

— Harry Shearer (@theharryshearer) September 25, 2018

the only independent comment i've spotted so far from a signer -- not that i've been looking very hard -- was joyce carol oates on twitter going in HARD abt how bad the JG essay is

Fintan O'Toole had a piece in The Irish TImes last week with his take

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-metoo-cannot-win-in-a-climate-of-fear-1.3639666

(tl, dr: The article was bad and Buruma "made mistakes' but he's a mate and we need editors who are willing to take risks)

I agree with a lot in that article, but nobody needs a man to explain how much leeway should be given to men before women are allowed to lose faith in them.

Many many XPs, but yes we need a Mollie Panter-Downes in the world again

I know this joke has been made approx 50 million times but: Fintan O'Tool

I guess its whether you think Buruma was taking a risk or trying to burn down the building.

I think it fairly likely that a significant proportion of the signers aren’t aware of all the details

Which, if true, is something given a lot of them aren't some rent-a-penny journo crying over getting yelled at on twitter but are able to churn out often considered thoughts of around 2-5K on a book, often covering a subject they've spent years thinking about. Maybe they'd take a pause and think about what they are actually signing.

this piece isn't quite as good as it could be -- it needed also to grapple with ballard tbh -- but the kicking that remnick gets pleases me, he is bad not good

lol i mean THIS PIECE: https://hmmdaily.com/2018/10/02/man-writer-against-nature/

(xp why do I keep typing "ponder" when I mean "polder") Do you think Remnick is a bad editor? Never read him much, but a lot of good writing (maybe mostly nonfiction) has been published during his time on top, whatever he actually had to do with it.

i'm no judge of the fiction as i barely read it: the cartoons seems trapped in a loop of sameness (the make-up-yr-own captions are almost always better): some of the arts is OK tho i HAAAAAAATE anthony lane: the long-read non-fiction reporting has highs (ronan farrow is so far a p good hire!) but i think the long-read non-fiction political commentary is patchy at best: jeffrey goldberg, george packer, jeffrey toobin, jon lee anderson -- an inadequate poor gaggle going back to the early 00s and iraq (toobin inadequate all the way back to the OJ trial tbh).

a friend on twitter who hadn't read a full copy for a few years picked a recent one up to read on a train and said it was entirely nervously obsessed with trump without being remotely insightful. which, ok, join the club in US media terms (on and off ilx haha) but i remember* when it stood well away from the lack and made something of that.

*bcz lol i am old, shawn 4evah

s/b pack but i've been wrestling with lacan half the day sorry

Anthony Lane is a miserable old lech who never met a turn of phrase he couldn't belabor into several painful paragraphs

Lane genuinely used to be good

not for a long time though

when, in the 70s?

…when he was apparently an adolescent? wow.

no he was bad from the get-go tho not as bad

Reportage, yeah: taking me deep or at least far into Yemen, Brazil, American Halls of Justice ( & related, incl. detention camps), for instance. Also Superfund sites, dark money, other related.

i like some of its younger crew of short commenters also: jia tolentino, osita nwanevu

(and to be fair to remnick tina brown hired anthony lane)

Sanneh still a bright spot. The Xtian rock piece was fun.

Yes. Also, the leftfield, for inst:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/08/the-comforting-fictions-of-dementia-care

...or else seemed to have reached a point at which the question of where they were was no longer important. GOAL.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/responses-to-reflections-from-a-hashtag/

no mark s. letter, no cred

it'll be the cover i'm sure of it

he's baaaaack

Buruma or Ghomeshi?

buruma, in the FT

i am reading this for some reason

it sucks and he sucks

without at all being aware of it "i am entirely incompetent and very out of my depth" still seems to be his line

doomed like the flying dutchman forever to sail the world's media, on his forehead a post-it note reading "dick" which everyone can see but him: the ian buruma story

― mark s, Thursday, September 20, 2018 10:39 PM (six months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my line is also unchanged

The picture of him in that piece is amazing.

"the age of outrage" -- better known as "the age of the unending self-own"

as you'd expect, this is good: https://hmmdaily.com/2019/04/01/ian-buruma-still-cant-talk-about-metoo/

I bought a copy of LITERARY REVIEW for the first time this week: an indulgence taking me away from LRB territory and into something easier and in some ways more wide-ranging.

Yeah, the LR is reAlly worthwhile.

Shocked into shame to discover that there is a *good poem* in the new LRB for maybe the third time in my time reading it :0
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n08/paul-batchelor/a-form-of-words

That was really...epic?

https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/molly-crabapple/

Pieces like this = the nyrb is good again

Or this:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/05/23/not-about-sex/

James Wood on Eton might at least have had entertainment or literary value. But it doesn't, really.

There is a particular strain of writing about Brexit to which the LRB quite embarrassingly gives a lot of space - a very caricatured, tiresome caricature of a tiresome thing, a ventriloquism of other people's supposed belief in Empire and British greatness.

I can believe that this critical strain has some factual basis, ie: some or many Brexit people really are like that. But as a rhetorical form it is even more exhausted than the thing it tries to caricature.

I think that a more useful approach to writing about Brexit, if one wants one, is to get at angles that are not quite so obvious (but perhaps this is obvious also), eg: the way that Brexit people are really not very pro-British at all but are multinational corporate cynics -- as has repeatedly been shown with Rees-Mogg and is (as far as I recall) probably true of Farage also.

Colin Burrow's piece on Wordsworth this week is terrific. I've never particularly cared about Wordsworth one way or another but he made me care.

Not for me! (this essay was discussed at the FAP)

Burrow knows a lot of poetry, which is good in itself, but I increasingly dislike him as a writer.

And the whole argument about 'Wordsworth's Fun', which CB largely endorses, seems utterly perverse - often amounting to 'WW is unwittingly funny because so solemn and bathetic', etc.

I felt he took that as a starting point in order to undermine it though! i.e. he preferred the superficially bathetic "I measured it - it was three feet wide" etc.

I don't know enough about Wordsworth, or the history of scholarship around him, to appreciate whether CB is actually saying anything particularly noteworthy about him. But it made me interested.

Same! This is mostly the line I took last night. I think if I knew more about him I might not like the details of what he was saying - which isn't just that WW is 'fun'. For instance, CB maps out WW's politics and its contours for about a 20 years period, which I liked, and then his r/ship with Milton (its useful to read his piece on Milton at the archive below: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/colin-burrow, his archive -- alot of which I've spent the past month reasing -- is a largely good primer on various middle-to-Reanaissance era poets)