London Review of Books

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?)

Fizzles: I agree that if Bolsonaro is not 'fascist' then he shouldn't be called that. I agree that it possible that categorizing things correctly is politically useful (or just the correct thing to do anyway). I also agree that fascist is largely a word with 1920s-1940s connotations and applying it to particular cases now, much later, is often questionable.

So what do I disagree about?

I think it's that I find it irritating that PA is more interested in scoring points against (I must reuse his phrase yet again) 'bien pensants' than he is in saying what is bad about what is, as I understand it, a radical right political movement in Brazil.

This is all part of PA's contrarianism. He probably prefers Nigel Farage to Gordon Brown.

When Bolsonaro was elected, a lot of people (for instance, gay people in Brazil) expressed a lot of fear. Some, I think, fled the country. I don't know enough about the reality to say if the fears have proved justified yet. But I would rather give these seemingly real dangers credence, than spend time scoring points against well-meaning liberals who may not have used quite the right word to describe them.

The one thing that PA allows is that native people in the Amazon, as I recall, are under threat. It's good that he points that out. Maybe he should also admit that other people and things may also be under threat.

It is strange for such a political thinker to be so uninterested in the actual real-life perils and disasters that politics often brings. PA's President is Donald Trump, but he doesn't seem bothered about it.

right, yes. one of the things i was uncertain about, when i posted above, was whether it really mattered whether 'crypto-military rule' plus homophobia wasn't the dictionary definition of fascism or not. you don't want to be the sort of person who goes well actually the fasces is a bunch of sticks and strictly refers to the italian variety what i think you mean is nazism a very different animal let me tell you &c.

you want to say 'well what does it matter?' in such circumstances. i come down on PA's side, because he identifies where it does matter – the slowness of the Brazilian left to comprehend social media for instance, and the aforementioned difficulty in translating popular support of the poor into class consciousness, enabling an educated, self-aware bulwark against Bolsonaro.*

also what you characterise as a complacency, i see more as an attempt at a dispassionate analysis of his character. PA identifies the homophobia, and warns that no one should expect him to be less brutal, for all the brittleness of his personality and circumstance, albeit in different paragraphs. the implication seemed to me to be reasonably clear and worrying. just that it would be specific to identifiable groups, rather than 'wholesale' oppression. i'm not sure he needs to add 'this is of course no less unwelcome', and i don't get the impression from his tone that he thinks otherwise.

However...

*I originally wrote 'self-aware bulwark against Bolsonaro's...' what? not populism, which PA seems slightly weak on, identifying it with its symptomatic expressions in many countries: immigration & sovereignty. my preferred emphasis and definition is here: politicisation of the state, rejection of constraint. sovereignty is an expression of that, but doesn't need to be the only one. military rule, and Bolsonaro's clear statements in his political career about that being a preferred option for government, mean i think the question of populism deserves more exploration.

the point remains - PA has defined Bolsonaro's success as being almost entirely a function of the collapse in legitimacy of the other parties. his absence from the hustings other than on twitter is seen as a part of his success. further, PA constantly describes the looseness of Bolsonaro's constituency, the brittleness of his position. If the essay has a failing for me, it's in its suggestion that Bolsonaro is only a collection of negative qualities, and not an assertion of something new and something dangerous in politics. (He's clearly dangerous in his position as President). PA's real subject is the failure of the left, and in an essay on Bolsonaro that would definitely be a charge of complacency.

I wouldn't call it complacent, rather something else -- I think as a contrarian he cultivates a cool toughness, which combines with his natural Olympian stance. He wants to imply that eg: only pathetic bien-pensants would worry about Donald Trump, whereas PA is way beyond such things.

rereading again, with PF's and F's comments in mind, i am *still* hitting speed bumps every time PA mentions either the PSDB or the PMDB -- the acronyms only differ by one letter and PA never spells which either acroynm stands for (see below) (and actually even their politics he seriously skims over in favour of structural shorthand: "centre right, fig-leaf asocial democratic" vs "centre, sprawling network of clientelism"

the latter is the one the PT (lula's party, the worke'rs party) went into coalitions with = basically the root of most of the corruption scandals that began blowing up all over the place abt five years ago…

anyway i shouldn't be having to write out a list to check back against each time: this is more "star writers don't need subbing" nonsense from MKW i fear :(

PSDB = Brazilian Social Democracy Party (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira)
PMDB = Brazilian Democratic Movement (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro)

I like this post.

I did not notice that PA actually wrote 'asocial democratic'.

haha no he didn't that is my bad typing -- but he did put 'social democratic' in scare quotes

I've yet to read the article and don't want to pass myself off as an expert on Brazil, but what I *can* say is that the military dictatorship that Bolsonaro is in clearer continuity with was on very good terms with Salazar back in Portugal (who I don't think you can make an argument for as anything but a fascist), and that ppl on the Brazilian and Portuguese left definitley saw the fight against their dictatorships as a common struggle back then. So fascism-adjacent at the very least.

OK so here goes:

One of things that pulled me up short rereading this was his cliffhanger sentence at the end of the Lula/Dilma section: “Yet this muted interim had, all the same, cleared the way for a high-pitched obbligato to come.” By which he means that the PT’s normal opponents (in particular the PDMB) had tumbled into same the morass of corruption and anti-corruption at the PT, and completely collapsed politically — but look, something nasty is coming down the pike!

Except “obbligato” doesn’t mean something nasty, even when it’s high-pitched: it means and I quote (the internet) “an instrumental part, typically distinctive in effect, which is integral to a piece of music and should not be omitted in performance”. So either PA is wildly misusing an unusual word, which can surely never be the case — or what exactly is he saying here?

I think he’s rather obscurely admitting that actually he doesn’t really want to write about Bolsonaro, who he doesn’t find especially interesting — but he realises he has to. The entire essay is named for JB, as is is second part — and yet it’s mainly not directly about him. It’s about Lula and the PT, and how and why its project failed. Which he goes into in a detail that suggests a tremendous sad affection: this was something PA wished had worked out, and he wants — earnestly, urgently — to set out why it didn’t.

Here’s some of what he’s juggling: the personalities, the manoeuvre of parties, the shifting nature of the legal context, the ideological make-up of the courts, the complex transformations (and non-transformations) of the layering of class, in a HUGE and very diverse country, the apparent deliquescence of the social background into insecurity and violence (tho I need to say more on this), and (if only gestured at) the sense that this should not be just shuffled into the general (“bien pensant”) sense that “populism is back and it’s very bad”. He also includes a very favourable drive-by review of André Singer’s examination of the same material, which I assume is his main source for this essay — while not omitting some interesting and pertinent criticism of same, in particular about the valency (as opposed to the morality) of the PT’s enwebment in corruption and how its drive against same took them down hardest. (I enjoy the ambivalence of PA’s anti-moralism here without at all knowing who’s correct: also useful to have the old meaning of the word ‘republicanism’ restated, with its problematics at least hinted at… )

(There’s an argument I sometimes see made that the extreme reaction in the UK in the 90s against “sleaze” has had many more bad effects than good

And I have to say that I think his organisation of this extremely complex multifold material is — if only for clarity, given its complexity — superb. It’s a triumph of his particular brand of structural marxism: setting out the byzantine social forces in full effect, and at the very least indicating the cultural vectors that help establish the hegemonic terrain. Is it an accurate portrait? Don’t ask me — I am seriously embarrassed by how little I know about Brazil (I got briefly excited when Caetano Veloso were mentioned in passing).

So anyway, this is the upside: a serious and deep exploration of why Lula fell and the mountain -range the PT now have to climb. It is NOT — despite title — much of an examination of Bolsonaro, except to faff around comparing him to and distinguishing him from Trump. And I think there’s a reason for this, which is hidden in and perhaps obscured by his flipping off the “left”, for (as he seems to see it) their chaotic unhelpful panic in the present moment, and concomitant bad analysis and English-speaking parochialism.

Basically — I guess it’s the entire root of his structuralism — he thinks the flamboyant and contradictory personalities in each case are a distraction for the social forces that have adopted these figureheads and are moving fast behind the scenes to reconfigure the battleground behind the noise and the absurdism (often in ways unrelated to the loud declarations of intent from the personalities). Don’t look at this, look at that! And a distraction, also, from the broader collapse of the centre left project of the 90s and 00s, which I think he is just by now bored of reiterating: this entire teratological efflorescence as an unavoidable outgrowth of the catastrophe of the Third Way etc etc, which correct or not as analysis is old ground for us all. The elaboration of how Lulaism — which for a time stood apart — fell foul of this collapse is I think primarily what he thinks it important to set out here (and indeed primarily what engages his enormous brain).

Part of this old-ground analysis has consistently been that what seems awful right now and incoming in fact merely continues what’s been becoming awful since c.2008, and plus a masked but desedimenting awfulness from well before that. The social rot that the Third Way failed to turn around; plus its very naive belief that — now at least arm in arm with the forces of capitalism — it could continue to direct policy where it chose in times of downturn.

He never steps back to say any of this: it’s implicit, possibly because he so strongly feels that contextualisation in respect of the US (let alone the UK) is always a move back towards cultural and political parochialism. And that the merely parochial hoohah directed at Trump or Brexit — especially from the centre left so-called — is actually strangely easily recuperable, by these deeper masked forces. At least until these force are better unmasked, and a politics of their demolition is more widely in place.

Of course from its olympian perspective — “just the structure, ma’am” — the NLR has never been good at the practical outlay of this politics of demolition, how and where to start it, what to do (except sometimes to scoff at its woollier manifestations: recalling a briefly snippy exchange between Anderson and Alex Cockburn re the anti-war marches of 2003, which PA had rather sneered at and Cockburn, always better at this kind of stuff, cogently defended). There’s a slightly self-parodic moment where PA seems to be arguing that the PT’s doom was sealed when they failed to pay attention to the intellectual layer (“the party essentially ignored them, in a myopic philistinism for which all that mattered were electoral calculations”). A serious question here might be, How could these intellectuals better have presented themselves and their critique, to ensure that self-critical analysis was seen as something that mattered? But it’s a question that the NLR would also struggle to answer with any vigour, I feel.

And that’s really what’s missing. PF laments the absence of greater response to e.g. Trumpism or the actual immediate effects (already realised, soon possible) of Bolsonaro in the driving seat. Anderson is arguing that we should actually be responding to something beyond this — but yes, he never says how and so it all ends up strangely apolitical.

(Note on PA’s treatment of the “apparent deliquescence of the social background into insecurity and violence” — left till later lol. This will surely do for now.)

PART ONE^^^ :^D

(part two if ever attempted will be a critique of PA's approach to "cultural vectors")

btw PA has written about Lula in the past

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n07/perry-anderson/lulas-brazil

So this latest dispatch being more concerned with Lula's project rather than Bolsanaro feels right.

xp, brilliant Mark, looking froward to pt 2!

skimming that earlier piece -- i will read it properly later -- PA could profitably have titled this new one "LULA: how very wrong i was, eh"

ty neil, tho FP'd obviously for putting pressure on me to write something i've actually said i might

I believe in you!