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

(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)

The 'Wordsworth's Fun' element is (only) half the review. I was not conflating it with the other half - WW's politics - which seems basically more valid.

So I said I enjoyed Andrw O’Hagan’s piece on Lillian Ross. Well, I did. For three reasons:

A: it’s about the New Yorker, at the peak of its imperial phase (mid/late-40s) and the long languorous tumble down from that. I love stories about the old-days New Yorker, they’re almost as much the reason I’m in the job I’m in as is the NME 1977-1983. So here were more.

B: without saying it out loud — and perhaps without actually realising it — it’s also about the much-contested roots of the ‘New Journalism’, in fact and as ethos (lol “Tom Wolfe — talentless”). This too is something I’m very interested in. (Subscribe to my patreon u fucks, so I can write more stuff like this… )

C: it’s explicitly an exploration, albeit a very brief and cheekily trollish (and rather sly) one, of what makes for good journalism. So that’s three.

The first spread is largely a character sketch from someone who was “there” (exactly where and when not well back up, let alone why and how): entertaining insider stories about people you’ve half heard of, with their most composed public-facing masks removed. Her hates (good list – esp.if you know something abt these various ppl, which I mostly do)(never very sure abt george plimpton tbh), her motivations, her distrusts blah blah blah. A gesture at her actual technique, again from the angle of someone “there”, at least at one stage of the process. Blah blah Shawn’s mistress for 40 years. Important claim (important anyway, but also for O’Hagan’s purpose): “only bad writers strategise about their possible critics before they choose how to write a story.” Blah blah more abt Shawn mistress for 40 years, inc. A defence from Janet Malcolm (“pretentious”). More in-person stuff, inc.a little bit which briefly illuminates the the intellectual/anti-intellectual tension of the old-days New Yorker: the gift that founder-editor Harold Ross (no relation, Lillian — who died two years ago aged 99 — was born Rosovky) and his gathered team brought into to literary journalism a series of editorial techniques aimed at wringing the most out of this very anxious divide. The tale of the New Yorker 1925-55 at least is the tale of the encounter of old-school newspapermen (H.Ross, Thurber etc) with fancy college kids from Cornell (E.B.White) or Bryn Mawr (Katharine White) or Harvard or Yale or etc or etc.

This clash and this mode of resolution were extremely important. (This is my thesis and I’m sticking to it: more elsewhere soon, I hope.) Clash and mode are both also part of the backstory at the modern-day LRB, its strengths and its flaws. It’s entirely unsurprising that O’Hagan only mentions it subtly side-swipey, borrowing lots of the energy from the Refreshing Contrarian TakeTM, without actually stating what’s at issue, especially for him. (A point worth making re strategising about yr possible critics, since AO’H entirely elides it, is that under Ross and then Shawn, e.g. from 1925-87, every single piece published by the New Yorker went through a redoubtable and indeed remarkable battery of fact-checking, editing, restructuring and rewriting: if they’d been accepted into this process a good writer maybe didn’t even actually need to pre-strategise, bcz all these editors were doing it for them. But in fact a Good New Yorker Writer –– one whose prose passed through the process not much altered, let’s say — was almost certainly someone who’d internalised the internal editorial critique right down to nerve-level.)

So, the things AO’H admires in her: her hatreds, her rudeness, her spite, her ruthlessness. And the theory that such flaws may make someone a better reporter – which he states at the close of p1 and expands in the first column and a half of p2: the writer-and-friendship theory. “She thought like a reporter. It wasn’t her job to be loyal and it wasn’t her think to be nice.” Cue LR quote abt the kindliness that she also be present: “Her entire career was spent igoring the force of that passage” (i.e. the one quoted) Someone butthurt calling her a Delilah for what she did to her friend Hemingway: “If you ask me, there aren’t enough Delilahs.” A
And then the review of the new edition of LR’s Picture (first pub.1952) and some guff to close: from here on he really does “bring nothing” (in Chairman Alph’s cheeky phrase).

The theory is in no way original to O’Hagan. Paraphrasing since I can’t be bothered to leaf thru anything for actual quotes but here are some examples:
— Journalism is stories someone doesn’t you to tell, or else it’s public relations – ppl think Orwell said this but actually it’s Voltaire William Randolph Hearst (!)
— A journalist is always betraying someone (Janet Malcolm)
— Reporters and editors don’t have friends ( Harold Ross, from the Thurber book I think?)

There was a little ilx-type spat abt marie le conte a while back, bcz she’d enthused abt the fun of the game of inside-westminster political reporting — and some of her foes were pulling prissy moralistic faces abt how “this is what’s wrong with journalism today”. Not to defend anything else MLC has ever written (not sure I’ve even read much she’s written off-twitter and I don’t follow her on) but my feeling here was: NO, it’s good to state yr pleasures and yr motivations up-front, not least bcz it’s so easy piously to lie abt same, and pious lying doesn’t make for better reporting either. Good writing is unrelated to good character: Good reporting is unrelated to “good” motivation. ilx in unfazed by the first idea but seems leery of the second.

Less the first page (as censored by books dot google), here’s a piece Vagabonds and Outlaws written in 1981 for Harpers, by Alex Cockburn, abt good journalism and its likely motivations, about the meaning of the phrase the “duty of the press” – and against the high-minded self-regard of a great of high-end US journalism. I meant to link it ages ago when ppl were kicking Gawker as it went down. (Gawker’s position being that it is absolutely wrong for information to be cheerfully circling within media’s offices that was then routinely being withheld from the public at large…) One of the heroes in it is (of all fkn ppl lol) Derek Jameson: “I’m not defending what I’m doing, Sometimes it’s right. Sometimes it’s wrong. I don’t hold with high-falutin’ talk. I don’t claim to be pure… I’m a newspaperman. I tell stories.”

tbh I like it when this claim resurfaces: because I think it’s worth bringing back to the surface the tensions that e.g. the Ross process for a time made a creative energy of harnessing — and which the emergence of ‘New Journalism’ so-called began to pull back apart. I think as a collective processing machinery it was in fact losing its salience: the Harvard-Yale faction had bedded itself, as it was always going (for one thing, the newspapermen-bred-and-born never took good physical care of themselves: Thurber was only 66 when he died, Ross only 59).

Anyway, I will expand on some of this elsewhere shortly, but for now — arriving the final twist — the sly element of all this is how AO’H weaves himself into the praise he’s directing at LR. “I was there, she used me thus, one day I would use her likewise, that day is now come: SHE IS GREAT AND SO AM I AND FOR THE EXACT SAME REASONS.”

tl;dr: u tht my grenfell piece sucked but guess what h8rs, the fact it wound YOU up is why it’s good not bad QED and out

This argument does not even slightly fly – but it’s useful to have it out in the world, along with the praetorian guard of the assumptions he uses to convince himself. There is in my mind a VERY GOOD AND URGENT CASE INDEED to re-address the Hearst-Ross-Cockburn-Gawker thesis, for all kinds of reasons (and to wonder, also, if one of the elements that disguises its worst misuses is the ever-vexed issue of “good” writing)

(So in conclusion this piece is GOOD for making me think abt all this stuff even if its motivations are bogus and its in-person insights are placed "in question" by his behaviour on other stories QED and out)

I do actually think that AO'H's last line is quite good.

colin burrows on wordsworth: haven't gathered my thoughts yet

malcolm bull on william davies: ditto (i llke davies's tweets)

james wood on eton: intermittently mildly interesting but the second sentence strikes me as highly unlikely ("at school, everyone is 'ambitious', everyone loudly stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws") -- sorry, "everyone" is bullshit in this sentence. eton is a very big school, and NOT everyone was ambitious: i didn't go to eton but i know this for a fact and it undermines wood that he says it at all. i am historically very much niot a wood fan -- for his bad opinions and his manner of expressing them -- so it's bit too tidily pat that i can now say "lol of course he's bad, he went to eton!" i do actually slightly know one quite nice good person who went to eton but i won't name-and-shame them here, even tho some ilxors will know of their work and possibly admire it.

the macron piece, the shining path piece and the keith thomas piece were all readable enough, and probably useful