London Review of Books

(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!

i certainly hope you do. that was a very stimulating summary, which I'm still digesting a bit.

realised while pootling round in the bus earlier that PF's position re PA on bolsonaro is exactly ep thompon's on PA re older monsters

another funny PA story: when he published a series of critical essays in the LRB in the early 70s [edit: mistyped this, s/b 80s] on key conservative thinkers -- oakeshott, hayek i think, forget the others -- e.p.thompson sent him a note saying "these are rascals! please stiffen your tone"

― mark s, Friday, September 9, 2011 2:43 PM (seven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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just looked it up -- it's from pel's obit for thompson, in 93:

"‘What’s Perry up to these days?’ he enquired. Tariq mentioned something I’d written on conservatism in this paper. ‘Yes, I know,’ Edward replied. ‘Oakeshott was a scoundrel. Tell him to stiffen his tone.’"

― a hurrrr hurrrr (history mayne), Friday, September 9, 2011 2:47 PM (seven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Finished reading this piece both yesterday and now. There happens to be an interesting letter about it on the LRB which provides further analysis on the role of television and the evangelical movement and seems to almost be addressing Mark's point on the lack of interest in Bolsanaro by filling in more gaps.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n03/perry-anderson/bolsonaros-brazil

(bottom of the page)

As for the piece I am not sure how good its analysis is at times. Too much is perhaps made of Bolsanaro's shooting for one, and it only mentions in passing the polls showing that Lula was apparently favourite to win the election against Bolsanaro were he allowed to contest. So much for all the obstacles facing the PT -- the economy, corruption, etc. -- but it actually took the judiciary (via threats from the military) to deliver the victory for Bolsanaro. Feels like he just runs around this?

(Incidentally Lula's project seems similar to the one in Venezuela at times -- a similar level of social programs combined with a lack of class warfare -- although there is a lot more mobilisation in Venezuela. I think he is good on the shortcomings of these pacts, which is the core of the piece)

i i would honestly like to see a perry-length LRB piece (not by him!) on these parallel evolutions of TV in italy, brazil and of course the murdoch network in the US (and inc. the effects of his newspapers on TV in the UK, esp.the degradation of political coverage on the BBC) -- the letter is useful (and witty) but it still feels to me that lots is going unexplored

(of course if it's not by perry we probably won't spend all our free time picking it to bits on this thread so swings and roundabouts for the proposed mystery writer of this piece)

The only English language writer I can think of who looked like he was interested in lots of foreign TV is Clive James :-(

ok yes i don't want him to write it either

I'm sure he can find time in between rewriting Dante and Proust and giving interviews about the surprising mystery of still being alive!

if CJ also rewrites powell then maybe we can distract perry for as long as it takes for mysteryman to get a-scribblin

Surely an LRB article on the significance of changes in UK TV would only be written by ... Lanchester.

TBF I would read that, as long as it wasn't fiction

i keep thinking about the only paragraph i’ve read of The Wall and how bad it was and wondering how he achieves such consistency.

I’ve grown a bit weary of the lrb house style*, esp Lanchester, even Meek’s one on media recently i thought was weak, so was pleased to see the recent Patricia Lockwood piece on twitter and was thinking how much more i’d enjoy the current house style if they had more pieces clearly not in it.

*that feeling that everything is set out and you nod along with it and... then nothing. (mark you summed part of this up well somewhere possibly itt, but i can’t quite remember how you put it.) it all feels a bit pre the legitimacy crisis of the cultural/political world. one style option is for things need to go in a bit harder - i’ve got empson’s voice in my head. there need to be suggested options, modelled outcomes. a willingness to get things measurably wrong rather than the ineluctable structural rightness many pieces aim for. another style i like is practiced by maggie nelson or kate briggs, rivka galchen too (tho not so much in the lrb) - the avoidance of that sort of structural ex cathedra dogmatism, with the creation of looser non dogmatic conversational spaces within the text. briggs associates this with barthes late lectures and i find it immensely refreshing whenever i read it. wry, personal, associational. at the moment it’s lockwood who practices a version of this best.

maybe where i was talking abt why i am unimpressed by lanchester the reporter (it's on the ferrante thread lol): Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels)?

i got into a mild beef w/flopson there bcz i said JL knows "nothing" abt economics meaning "nothing i didn't already know -- he never NEVER digs into anything i find unexpected", which i guess is largely what i feel i pay for w/the LRB. not so much deep thought as counter-intuitive elements that help me pin down some larger phenom. cf the petrarch piece, which was full of these :)

meek tbf does provide these, even if largely anecdotal-empirical (i.e. he goes out and talks to farmers, which i have not really done since i was a kid and moved to the hateful city)

absolutely and meek is usually v good. i just found his newspaper one a bit weak by his standards. and yes that was the post I was thinking of, thx.

probably i’m asking of the lrb something it’s not intending to do but the explanatory-analytical framework stands back from its judgments other than in the small book review bit of each essay - the treatment of rusbridger in the meek piece was a good example - and i could sometimes wish for a bit more interrogation. less passivity in the face of their subject. if they’ve gone to the trouble of reaching deep in to a subject (and i totally agree on the usefulness of counter-intuitive points) then i’d like to hear their thoughts on the future direction and possible ways which the situation might be improved or changed for the better.

i'm thinking about this bcz i'm right now writing something abt another august and stately journal, and it suddenly occurred to me that -- when "augustness and stateliness" are a key part of yr brand (and thus get all in among yr politics -- it's actualy quite hard to do the other bit of journalism, which is someone running in waving some bit of paper or a photo or a recording or whatever yelling "OMG HAVE YR HEARD/READ/SEEN THIS! we need to do something on it/about it PDQ, this CHANGES EVERYTHING"

where there's a sense that the urgency can for a week or so be offset against the (august and stately) accuracy, the omg the PRESENT and the FUTURE depend on it etc. It's a mode that LRB is entirely set against, at least since it stopped employing Cockburn and Hitchens and Paul Foot. There's good reason to turn yr nose up at it in its present form, it's actually very extrmnely corroded and degraded in media at large currently*! But it's a mode journalism needs also to deal with and here and there to exhibit -- and I think a dimension that Meek piece on media did not really look at at all.

*the alt-listings model was killed by (a) the internet very effectively unbundling a good cross-subsidy model and (b) all kinds of parasitic hedge-fund orgs buying up titles and asset stripping them for short-term profit. the gawker-model ran full tilt into the problem of its own contradictions -- "let's tell ALL the gossip that journalists know but keep to themselves!" -- which is that what was needed as a strong renegotation of the acceptable limits of which stories journalists shd not in fact pass on. in the UK the alt-tabloid model (skwawkbox/the canary) has entirely failed to decorrode or dedegrade the latent value of yellow journalism (which is NOT NOTHING: speed may nopt be a virtue but it *is* an existent quality and therefore has to be tackled and managed).

that's v interesting.

and immediately and btw i totally agree that speed is a virtue and in the respects you outline both in the 1st para and in yr note *is* journalism (bcos of my lol Front Page view of it - the ability to write at short notice high impact copy that conveys the sense of a thing happening to people who aren't experiencing it).

i'm trying to tease out some thoughts, but I'm going to put down the unwinnowed version here to see if it helps:

Is the problem not speed per se, but in fact speed combined with a massive increase in volume?* our ability to generate and distribute/transmit data has massively increased, and urgency is often confused with 'this thing is happening now'. Our ability (in terms of industry and also in terms of individual journalists and readers) to editorially make a decision about newsworthiness is completely swamped). The notion of story angle has vanished in this process, and going begging for a master, 'angle' has been hijacked by the politics and motives of power <- this feels as good a definition of that unhelpfully inclusive term 'fake news' as any.

in this model, you will get a natural convergence of the wide range of news between gossip and Big Important Things (i consider gossip important and entertaining, but it's useful to be able to maintain a separation), and a flattening out of the moral, editorial and lifespan perspective.

if we look elsewhere, for instance at places generating massive amounts of data - Candy Crush for instance - the process of sifting and finding meaning in that is algorithmic. And as we all know, the same logic is being applied by Facebook etc to make editorial decisions. of course the editorial principles at play are entirely alien to the traditional notion of editorial policy. Although rule-based heuristics and algorithms are very close, the idea of heuristics as 'good-enough' judgment based on certain environmentally useful principles, and data crunching as processing massive data and generating 'insight' based on useful patterns, that are close to specific business requirements (flagging a criminal transaction eg) they have different consequences.

i feel in some way the conditions for the urgent speed/august accuracy styles or methods to contribute to each other and be successful and useful have entirely liquidated. This I think is yr corrosion. Stately/August accuracy can seem irrelevant, urgent speed, a froth of time-expiring info, whose mayfly life-span is shorter than the ability to place it into a structure of verifying/truth-testing etc (twitter is the overridingly obvious example, but i would expand it to include the general aspect of news-without-import which has been characteristic of the brexit period, and the churning through of publicity via press releases via the wires). The two methods can in no way communicate. This seems to me to be a very bad thing, without a solution currently. I guess 'Long Reads' as they've emerged in the press (rather than having been always present in other ah organs and periodicals etc) are a fairly obvious example of this problem being perceived and an attempt to solve it being put in place (I'm not sneering - the long reads can often be very good - i'm more interested that they have appeared and have this name, but i don't think they are in any way a solution).

point being the processors of this and validators of this information in the Stately August mode are detached, and their function moribund, other than as the useful and necessary explanatory force, but this detachment probably produces the sad nodding along, at its worst represented by Lanchester's boilerplate takes, the articles produce. not quite history, not quite news, yes you're right, but kind of so what? Telling us accurately that we're all going down the shitter has limitd appeal. and lol let's face it the lrb's turnaround times mean that they're often giving their verdict well after everyone's forgotten what prompted it. I'm being harsh. James Meek's extraordinary piece on Afghanistan of a few years ago, had the ability to reconfigure, with detail, historical narrative in a way that gave insight both into and beyond its subject. Same with his chocolate factory piece. But i do feel there is a sort of ex cathedra decadence to being *right* here – it needs an edge of judgment bringing it back to the current conjuncture, back into the froth and frenzy from which it is detached, rather than 'and this is why we are where we are today' FIN.

more generally i feel the crisis of legitimacy which i hook on to the post global financial crash world, but which in terms of distal causes can be assigned to the end of the cold war and the establishment of the neoliberal end of history consensus, is in represented here in this split, and via that is seeping into actual questions of style.

*I was at a localisation (dubbing and subtitle translation, regional video conforming) conference the other day. A model which had been stable has now been entirely destabilised by the huge increase in volume of video assets driven by the OTT (over-the-top internet rather than broadcast/networks/cable) platforms like Netflix. What broke? There's too much to translate, not enough translators. Why isn't that stimulating demand? Because translators and voice talent aren't getting paid more. Why not? Because the per-asset price agreement with the customer was not linked to volume, and so was a promise to pay no matter what the volume. The supply of people able to process the material is fundamentally out of whack with the amount of material that needs to be processed and no one's got the capability to generate more money out of the procurement system. I found this interesting because in an area I understand, you have a model of both the secular stagnation problem (high employment, but inflation not going up, wages only going up slightly, the breaking of the Philips Curve), and the consequent problem of growth fucking an industry, which sounds ridiculous.

The death of the Phillips curve in one chart: While unemployment rate in the Eurozone has dropped to 7.8% in Jan, the lowest since Sep2008, core inflation has also fallen, contrary to the theory of the Phillips curve. pic.twitter.com/fCmXuZCdsp

— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) March 1, 2019

as elsewhere the expected solution is from AI//macbhine learning/algorithmic approaches - ie the knowledge industry being automated in the way manufacturing was in the 19th C - in this case via machine translation. this has a place, but it fundamentally changes the process and in ways that are quite difficult to define the end output, in fact the fabric of our intellectual perception gets rewoven but such production changes. algorithmic processing is not in itself bad, but produces a subtly different sausage. i'll give a very basic example bcos that's probably a little abstract. in order to get through higher volumes of media translation, machine translation (MT) is used to generate an initial transcript 500 times quicker than it will take a translator to do so. A subsequent human QC process will take much longer than a QC process on a human translation, but only by about half. So the overall productivity is massively increased. However translators doing the QC have to be told to avoid correcting things like 'house' to 'home', ie re-translating, as this will massively reduce productivity. They are asked to – division of labour time – split out the process of *editing* from the process of *translating*. The output is subtly different. In a sense dehumanised. Interestingly, it may be more effective to get domain specialists to correct the machine translation (which will often get domain specific stuff wrong - medicine, IT, fly fishing - unless specifically trained on it). These domain specialists will get the mechanics of the content right, but the translation will be left as is, apart from where it is evidently garbage.

Does it matter? I'm not sure it makes any difference whether it matters, but i do think it changes the cultural fabric of the world, and again, in ways that are difficult for us to perceive or articulate.

machine-learning does human faces: thispersondoesnotexist

the faces are (mostly) ok but their relationship to their surroundings (hats) is unsettling if largely antic, and their relationship to other ppl in the picture (and sometimes just to their own ears or skin) quickly gets lovecraftian

in general i think our culture *is* processing and responding to this, but our cultural institutions are trapped in a kind of double deathspiral of required models: (A) of how to frame these changes in time to reconnect the stable archive to the frothing moment, and (of course) (B) how to pay for themselves :(

yes, that seems the problem in a nutshell. i would expect to see more a more protean set of styles as the channels of the printed word tried to find new ways to reconnect, which in part is why i've been so pleased with some of the LRB's more unusual forays, and the effort they've made at the very least to increase the number of women writing after that disastrous issue of a couple of years ago.

i have to say as well, that buried on the page under the mountain of Perry Anderson, the At the Ashmolean piece about Hadrian's infatuation with Antinous, and Hadrian's power to disseminate his image everywhere and erect cities in his name, and attach constellations to his eternal existence, felt like a wonderful example of how substantial and strange-seeming the reconfigurations of culture and power can be throughout history.

I still mostly think that the LRB is quite well written, and better written than most other publications that I see. So I wouldn't want to be too critical of its house style if there is one.

On the other hand I could agree that there could be something in Fizzles' criticism and his wish for other styles - eg: more polemical, opinionated or uncompromising? Unsure if that's what he means; I am reading Empson again at the moment - he's opinionated but frankly not very clear most of the time, so I'm not sure he counts as 'going in hard'. I now recall that Empson used to write for the LRB!

Unfortunately the other mode that Fizzles wants to see more of, in the kind of examples he cites, eg Lockwood, I tend to think is dreadful.

I have still not received the current - is it current? - issue. This is fairly typical.

I don't know whether this reflects anything broader about the LRB.

Yes, “Empson” in his “I think x is wrong because” mode, imitating the texture of his thought, which seems so often to produce a logic so opaque as to have to be taken on faith (enjoyable as it is) is probably a v bad idea.

Do you dislike Lockwood specifically? Or is it the wider set of what I consider new strategies in say Maggie Nelson for uncovering meaning or allowing it to emerge from adjecancies rather than more structured or linear argument? (That in itself may be opaque so I can expand if necessary)

i like empson. i also like that he loathed derrida -- who i also like and feel often took his stands on quite similar ground (inc.style viz " a logic so opaque as to have to be taken on faith (enjoyable as it is)")

I think 'everybody likes Empson' - literally there are dozens of different people who have written very favourably about him and I can't think of anyone who has done the opposite. I have read Michael Wood's whole (naturally hugely favourable) book on Empson.

So I like him also. And I keep reading SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY. But it is very slow going, very clotted. While I can see things to admire, I can't say it's usually saying something very clear.

If there is a simpler or more straightforward Empson, maybe it can be found in his LRB contributions?

Derrida, a few years ago I realized I did not really understand, so stopped.

Lockwood, I have found dreadful.

Not sure I have read Nelson but what I read about one of her books gave me the impression I would think the same about her.

Fizzles presented two ways forward for the LRB - more self-indulgence and more straightforward strong opinions. I guess I am saying the latter sounds better.

empson is an all-time favourite. forceful. strong. funny (cf the famous portrait of shakespeare which gives him the impression shakespeare has just come from a large banquet where he has had several rounds of wine, but is keeping his assurance such that he might say “I’ll be all right if I’m not joggled” to an anxious lady). almost magical at times (that opacity). his dismissals are almost thrilling. he’s constantly *at it* - pushing it, looking visibly using his considerable intellectual tools - argufying is a good term for him.

i think both would be good. i think the times call for more strategies and methods being used. naturally i wouldn’t call their style self-indulgent. tho i would note that certainly nelson, briggs, galchen and to a degree in the last samurai dewitt have all written about the need to have a writing structure and approach that can accommodate having a child, the interruptions of the world, of other needs, into the main focus of work. this obviously contra the pram in the hallway. that i would agree could be called indulgent, even self indulgent but not of course with any of the moral judgment of rules not being adhered to the phrase normally implies.

xxp

"more self-indulgence": lol this is a highly contentious and loaded interpretation of what fizzles in fact suggested, given the context of his and my discussion!

(caveat: i haven't read the lockwood piece, probably bcz it touches on things i have possibly non-straightforward strong opinions on -- viz how to engage with newly emergent models of information exchange, and what they night be doing to us -- so i don't to leave it till i'm sleepily in bed as per usual)

semi-related disgression: does the LRB still run poems? i have got so used to never ever reading them in all the time i've been reading it (since 1983 i think) that i didn't spot if/when it stopped -- there seem to be none in the most recent issues to hand?

fwiw i should say i don't think the internet piece fully worked. she herself points out it was a lecture and it's clear it would be better suited to that format, but i was pleased to see it there.

it does. but perhaps less frequently (and the lockwood piece also triggered a similar thought - what space is this occupying in the editor's mind?). iirc there was one bloody seidel poem in the grenfell issue, can that be right?

actually it had four poems in, including a Seidel.

and the latest one also does, tho like the pinefox i have not yet received mine.

I don't think I have ever really enjoyed or appreciated a poem in the LRB.

I have often disliked one.

My point about Empson is: we can all stand around saying he's great, but what about his tendency to be incomprehensible?

I would like more of the straight talking strong opinions that Fizzles values in him, less of the involution.

semi-related disgression: does the LRB still run poems? i have got so used to never ever reading them in all the time i've been reading it (since 1983 i think) that i didn't spot if/when it stopped -- there seem to be none in the most recent issues to hand?

― mark s, Sunday, 3 March 2019 14:44 (two hours ago) Permalink

There are a couple of poems every issue. Anne Carson has one in the latest and she is almost always great (although I haven't gone through the full archive: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/anne-carson)

Rebecca Tamas -- who is often good on twitter and has a collection out soon -- had one published a while back and again this is another example of the LRB sourcing new voices: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n19/rebecca-tamas/palermo

seven types of ambiguity (all of them bad) by william empfox

Bringing things back once again to Powell/Proust/Anderson, here's an Anthony Powell entry on Empson that I just read in the last volume of his journals (this one is from 31.3.1992):

I read William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, never done before... Empson is always enjoyable, although, as with all professional literary critics, one cannot share the excessive hair-splitting of meaning, although Empson's humour is always immensely enjoyable. When he makes quotations, Shakespeare to Omar Khayyam, he always has something both funny and apposite to say (for instance, Proust's novel being like a description of a novel that unfortunately has been lost.) Wish I had known Empson beyond meeting him once (perhaps a couple of times), when I was able to tell him how pleased I was when he referred to something Templer said, as if everyone ought to know who Templer is.

(re poems in recent issues: i have apparently trained myself so well not to read them that i no longer even see them when looking right at them)

I like that description of Proust. Surely it's not in SEVEN TYPES?

I can't quickly find out, because my copy of SEVEN TYPES has a publisher's note pasted in the front saying that it doesn't have an Index even though Empson says it does.

From LRB archive:

William Empson and ‘Advanced Thought’
SIR: One thing about Sir William’s very peculiar piece (LRB, 24 January): unless he has access to Greville’s notes, he cannot know that Sidney said ‘need’, for Greville in his book says ‘necessity’; he, not I, preferred the long fussy word.

Frank Kermode
King’s College, Cambridge

William Empson writes: I am sure Kermode is right. If I had checked, I would have ascribed the mistake to Greville. Everyone who recalls the legend says ‘thy need’, and that is what Sidney would have said.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n02/letters#letter4

Empson writing about things I actually already know about: comprehensible and fun in the way we all like.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n15/william-empson/the-ultimate-novel

(that is, I understand him here - maybe when I don't understand him it's partly because I just don't know the field.)

"Parodies are appreciative criticisms in this sense, and much of Proust reads like the work of a superb appreciative critic upon a novel which has unfortunately not survived."

p249 of 7ToA as made available here: https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.215758/2015.215758.Seven-Types_djvu.txt

also this version has an index, though the page numbers may not be right for yr edition

Wish I could read the whole review. Never thought of Ulysses as sad, though, not even comic-sad.

I can't disagree with that.

I did make the effort to read the whole 2-part review online; my recollection is that it only initially pretends to be a review and then becomes a 20,000-word Empson statement on Ulysses, offering a bizarre biographical and sexual reading. In fact I think this material may appear again in Empson's USING BIOGRAPHY.