London Review of Books

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

(or apparently on some other site)

so: I haven't embarked on the perrython beyond the first sentence (critique so far: "teratology" is phoning it in frankly) but the petrarch piece is terrific, if only for joining the dots between ciecero, chaucer, anne boleyn, the marquis de sade and 70s film-maker luschino visconti (or ancestor of same, with identical name, in which the aristocratical clue is)

not sure i'd given petrarch a single thought since the very mild nerdly abreaction against a gag in the young ones where rick invokes abt "petrarchian sonnets" (s/b "petrarchan", come on elton). the actual most fun paragraph in this absorbing and useful piece is:

Petrarch’s Italian love lyrics, and what Celenza calls the ‘dreamy, haunted persona’ he adopts in them, had a huge influence on English poetry. This is somewhat ironic, as he doesn’t seem to have thought very highly of the English. A passing reference to ‘British barbarians’ (barbari Britanni) suggests he associated them with the Germanic vandals who sacked Rome. Even worse, they are ‘timid barbarians’ — a reference to the slavish scholastic admiration of Aristotle in Oxford and Cambridge.

i mean luchino (i checked this and then failed to change it, come on elton)

also cicero not ciecero lol

Its really good and yes loved the connections. I scored a paperback of a collection of Petrarch in English a few weeks ago which covers much the same ground as in the latter half of that piece.

Cancelling my subscription. Joined on the 10th January and have received nothing so far, took them 4 days to reply to an email I sent them asking why I hadn't received any issues yet. I'll read this thread instead.

So they've been sending my issues to the wrong address - they've got one digit of my postcode wrong. It's possible that I got it wrong when I filled out the online form - except confusing a 1 for a 7 on a keyboard is unlikely, especially if you've typed it hundreds of times. More likely is that someone has physically written the postcode and mistaken a 7 for a 1 - what century are we in again, LRB? Anyway, they've cancelled it.

... now I come to think of it, they already had my address as I had a yearlong subscription a couple of years ago! Clowns.

this feels characteristic still. i assume its still haemorrhaging cash. in its funding as well as its subs dept it feels a bit like a (very welcome) artefact from a past age and you do wonder what will happen when mk wilmers goes.

What is your evidence that it is losing money?

If you don't think it is efficient under the current editor, then I don't see why you should think that it would be more imperilled under another editor. Wouldn't it, logically, be more efficient and more viable?

Either way, as I have said on this board before -- I have never seen any evidence of what its finances are. The only thing I have ever heard, anecdotally, is that its subscribers have increased; and clearly its empire has grown with BM lectures, films, etc.

mk wilmers is the money behind it as well as the editor - hence the concern that when she goes her personal interest and financial backing of it won't be passed on to anyone.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/09/london-review-books-lrb-best-magazines-world-mary-kay-wilmers

For all its success, the London Review of Books struggles to make money. It owes its continued existence to the generosity of Wilmers herself, who regularly siphons in cash from a family trust fund.

I'd like to support them but they make it difficult by bombarding you w/ emails, needily begging for yr attention, then fucking it up when you give in and subscribe. I don't know why they have a 24-48 hour policy for replying to emails, though it's 48+ hours in practice, what is their subscription department doing all day? TBF the subscription department is probably somebody with a grand sounding title, who works two days a week, and somebody's teenage son or daughter on an unpaid internship.

serried ranks of subs richly paid to sit around all day in no way altering copy by j. lanchester, a. o'hagan etc

i did once apply but was headed off by whoever responded saying p much saying "it's an intern thing really, you're way overqualified" -- which is a pity bcz i'd have enjoyed innocently cutting all the perrywords

What is your evidence that it is losing money?

I thought I linked this last time we discussed the LRB's finances, but the evidence is the accounts:

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/01485413/filing-history

See notes 2, 8, and 11 in "accounts for a small company made up to 31 March 2018". It isn't a going concern without the interest-free loan from "a company under the control of LRB's parent undertaking". And that went up from £4,627,377 last year to £6,851,563 this year.

I am not an accountant - could be misunderstanding that. But it seems pretty clear.

I doubt that I have competence to understand that page, but I agree, it looks like substantial evidence (of whatever the case may be). I had never seen it or heard of it before.

I literally did not know that such public information about companies existed online, though I had an idea that one could go and request it somewhere.

read the perry anderson bolsonaro/brazilian politics piece. very useful for me, who knows nothing about brazilian politics, which of course also makes it difficult for me to comment on its analysis. for me it was at its strongest - sitting up and saying 'this is the stuff' - on the classification of bolsonaro, where he attacks a lazy identification with fascism, and the subsequent analysis of the political structures of the left, and their future, *somewhat* optimistic, with a body slam of a conclusion:

One must hope these judgments hold good. But memories can fade, and elsewhere, social exclusion has proved only too cruelly viable. The left has always been inclined to make predictions of its preferences. It would be an error to count on defeat self-correcting itself with time.

I'm afraid I almost diametrically disagree.

The attack on Bolsonaro's critics / classifiers is typical of PA as I described above: yes, some analytical value, but he's keener to score points against 'bien pensants' than to recognize actual dangers and admit that certain things may be very bad. We may be able to prove that Bolsonaro isn't a 'fascist' - fine. When we've done that, maybe we should recognize the great fear expressed by thousands of Brazilians and take it more seriously, whatever the label may be.

As for those last lines, they amount to saying: 'Some people may say things will get better, but they could be wrong'. It is very easy for anyone to say this about anything, and often be proved correct. It's like me saying Tottenham won't win the Champions' League. Probably accurate, but it doesn't demonstrate or require much perspicacity.

And the statement that 'The left has always been inclined to make predictions of its preferences' is simply false. Any instance of someone on 'the left' being pessimistic about the outcome of an election disproves it. And most of us can think of hundreds of instances of that.

i think the point you make about the latter statement is fair, or at least it needs more exploration than it can give itself as a concluding sentence.

for context

Fascism was a reaction to the danger of social revolution in a time of economic dislocation or depression. It commanded dedicated cadres, organised mass movements and possessed an articulated ideology. Brazil had its version in the 1930s, the green-shirt Integralistas, who at their height numbered over a million members, with an articulate leader, Plínio Salgado, an extensive press, publishing programme and set of cultural organisations, and who came close to seizing power in 1938, after the failure of a communist insurrection in 1935. Nothing remotely comparable either in terms of a danger to the established order from the left, or of a disciplined mass force on the right, exists in Brazil today.

on the fascism, i appreciate Anderson's desire to categorise and define the word and the political state in Brazil. The word fascism is used a lot at the moment, which is understandable, but the lines of force it implies seem to me to centre very much round the second world war, where the US and UK were fighting definitive 'baddies'. It's an easy bucket, somewhat forgivable. Its asking the word to do too much today, and asks too little of us to define and fight on their own terms, not because they are fascism, the racism, homophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and generalised ravenous capitalism assault on the lower-income classes that we see in the US and many European countries at the moment. I guess a shortcut to what i am saying is that fighting 'fascism' allows a sort of centrist position - the liberal response, but that a proper analysis of this assault upon progressive society produces a more rigorous form of leftism.

Not to categorise correctly now, runs the risk of not configuring the response effectively. Your method ends up producing strategy and tactics designed to fight the fascism of the past, rather than the poison of today, its paraphernalia and methods. Specific to Brazil, Anderson is saying I think Bolsonaro represents more of a continuity with military rule, its preferences and brutalities) than it does the fascist organisations of Brazil's past.

It's also part of Anderson/Singer's contention that Lula did not do enough to enable the poor to become class-conscious via education and empowerment, so that the PT maintained a 'populist opposition between rich and poor' which Bolsonaro was able to exploit, due to that lack of class-consciousness.

This seems to me a structured way to apporach the problem, which as I say, I appreciate, not least because it enables that structure to be examined and discussed or argued over.

(i am on my second pass thru this piece and have not made my mind up except to say this: i find the acronyms of brazilian political parties unreasonably muddling -- as every single one of them begins with P, why not drop the P?)