London Review of Books

I really enjoyed that Berlin piece - it felt weirdly far from the usual LRB mode - crossed over into a personal enthusiasm* that almost felt _gauche_ by the conventions of English literary journalism. This is good not bad - it's one of the few pieces in there that actually made me pay attention and want to read someone.

I liked her internet piece. I don't know why you'd pair her with Lanchester to talk about the web, she just seems brilliantly far ahead of that plodder both in understanding and ability to describe.

*not to be confused with slightly stiff formal anecdote about the circs in which you first read an author.

more of a demand from readers to have things explained via translation into a non-experimental language

this is true, for sure -- and i have no beef with writing that genuinely works towards this… but a lot of the so-called translation i was reacting against was stuff basically checking the avant-garde item off on a general list of the things avant-gardism is Held To Be, politically or futurologically or whatever. so it wasn't really translation at all, but projection, via the micro-medium of shunting around an artist's promo phrases and self-description on a fuzzyfelt board to produce the needed correlation

(actually fuzzyfelt is too sweet a word but i have to get to work lol)

On Empson, I think one mode of his difficulty is down to a few things that have come up above:

a) assuming that the reader knows what he's talking about
b) something like amazingly confident anti-scholarship - just reading half of someone's entry in the DNB and deciding to have a crack at historical/biographical reading based on that and guesswork.
d) Using that casual, engaging style to present the above (along with his unusual personal sensibility) as completely obvious, just something straightforward that people happen to have missed

I'd say one of his great virtues is being magnificently wrong. Like you're in the middle of this baffling, bluffing, brilliant trick, your miles from where any conventional critic would have landed you (and it's all being presented as 'well, this is just common sense') and you have to think or argue your way out of it for yourself.

(He's not always like this of course - sometimes just brilliant)

Fizzles:

I share your view of Runciman.

I haven't actually read the Lockwood internet article - I seem to have filed that issue away having only managed the first couple of paras. My thoughts on Lockwood were more re: her earlier LRB essays.

So again, I don't share others' enthusiasm for those. The line about writers looking like murderers I find quite a good example of something that is bad and irritating about her.

I'm afraid I also disagree with your statement that the thread has proved your point, basically for the reason you give yourself:

the reason i felt it was a bit cheeky or unhelpful to say this is there probably can be a bit of a slippery slope that says “if it’s controversial it must be good” which wouldn’t be my intention to recommend.

I respect the case here about Empson, which is clearly founded on great knowledge of him as a writer. What I am getting at with him is not so much whether his arguments are right or wrong, but more simply that he can be clotted and snarled up. I'm happy to read his controversial bold arguments, as long as they are simply clear enough to follow rather than a vast para of involution on something whose identity I never knew about in the first place.

I find it quite likely that SEVEN TYPES is more clotted than much later work.

The line about writers looking like murderers I find quite a good example of something that is bad and irritating about her.

otm

What I am getting at with him is not so much whether his arguments are right or wrong, but more simply that he can be clotted and snarled up

true, point taken - it eases off laater on, but 7 Types and The Structure of Complex Words both have that logic-problem tangledness that I do find fun, but at some point it turns into "no, you've lost me there"

I have owned SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL for years but I have never really been able to make sense of Empson's idea of pastoral. It does not seem to have anything to do with pastoral literature and art as I have experienced it.

"in a sense there is nothing that is not a pie" — william empson

I have owned SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL for years but I have never really been able to make sense of Empson's idea of pastoral. It does not seem to have anything to do with pastoral literature and art as I have experienced it.

THIS IS THE CORRECT WAY TO DO WRITING in my extremely under-commissioned opinion

The line about writers looking like murderers I find quite a good example of something that is bad and irritating about her.

Isn't it self-evident that most writers are kinda unhinged in some way - she is just taking it one level up with that remark.

And on twitter one of the memes that takes off is the "please run me over" one. Readers are begging to be killed by writers. Its cool.

I finally received the new issue.

David Bromwich seems less bad than usual.

Isn't it self-evident that most writers are kinda unhinged in some way - she is just taking it one level up with that remark.

thanks for explaining it, it still isn't good

it made me laugh \o/

i really liked Christopher Clark's recent piece on the revolutions of 1848. it probably falls into Fizzles' "August structural rightness but so what" mode but still

il liked discovering that the a in a.r.ammons stands for archie :)

Notes:

1: I was wrong to say that Bromwich was OK. The article turned into a combination of dull personal anecdote and nasty, unfounded attack on people he perceives as less sensibly centrist than himself. If it was a UK article it would probably be telling us that Tom Watson or Jess Phillips was the Labour Party's best hope.

2: Clark on 1848 OK - informative maybe about something I really know little about. The one memorable aspect of it I suppose was its tendency to make things contemporary by comparing 1848 to Arab Spring, newspapers to social media, etc.

3: Still reading Ammons article, don't like it at all - the bit I had got up to was the worst kind of indulgence that the LRB (and others) gives to aimless writing. I don't know Ammons himself at all and don't comment on him.

when does the aimless writing begin in the ammons piece? (i too am only a short way into it, i haven't taken against it yet)

For me, the worst bit yet is the para starting 'In the past' on the 2nd page.

'I write this to be writing' - good for him, maybe, but not necessarily worthwhile to anyone else.

maybe ilx shd do a podcast abt what's bad in the new lrb each time it comes out

tom ewing pointed out on facebook that the cover looks like a buttplug: https://cdn.lrb.co.uk/assets/covers/m/cov4105.jpg

tho that is (a) not very podcast-y content (visual) and (b) not very pinefox-y content (mildly dirty joke)

Agreed !

Given that I have never heard of Ammons before, the Ammons article to me is like a parody - 'what if the LRB invented a poet and reviewed his Selected Poems'? Very generic. Would be good as a parody.

Colin Burrow on Propertius also bad in a different way - blokeish familiarity and joshing sexual innuendo, from an unwelcome source.

Started David Thomson who has the virtue of being David Thomson.

once registered lrlrb (london review of london review of books) on twitter to use as a lrb grousing account. Never got round to doing anything with it.

ammons’ sphere is one of the best poems i’ve ever read

i haven’t read the piece but figured i should comment on ammons

David Thomson is embarrassing, and nobody should ever let him write about Nicole Kidman ever again

Are you content for him to write about other people?

Burrow on Propertius was really, really good in the sense that he took care to review it in the context of what a reader might think of it today. I certainly would pick up a translattion.

The Ammons review was fine from what I read of it. There isn't anything aimless about it - starts of with a 'this is a poet that matters' which is the opposite of aimless, in fact - which is probably why I didn't finish it (although I would've done if I wasn't so tired). Tries to build a lot of enthusiasm.

Looking at the current LRB issue and Michael Wood on Brecht was an OK discussion, still mulling it over.

On the poetry corner I liked Lieke Marsman a lot - https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n06/lieke-marsman/three-poems

A small clarification: I didn't say that the review of Ammons was aimless, but that Ammons' own poetry appeared, at least at one point, to be aimless - which the poetry virtually acknowledges: 'I write this to be writing' - and that the review was too indulgent of this.

In this and in other ways, I found the review very generically LRB, which curiously connects to what others have (negatively) said about LRB house style, though they don't seem bothered by this particular review.

The Propertius review was founded in an extensive knowledge of the history of translations and editions, and was quite informative for those of us who don't know the material.

Unfortunately I also found its tone often misjudged.

re Thomson, he is 78 and one could well suspect that he is past it. Perhaps he is.

Yet, oddly, this particular recent review (Who is Michael Ovitz?) doesn't give any hint of that.

Except - I have just remembered his curious parenthetical reference to agents' fees, where he insists that LRB readers need to know the diffeerence between film and literature in this regard. Unsure whether that's a tonal veering.

He has only ever written 9 pieces for the LRB, some of them short:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/david-thomson

The new edition arrived yesterday. I'm not near to opening it yet.

(Edition? -- I mean: issue, of the LRB.)

PS: self-critical note re Ammons discussion: my original comment on Ammons was not very clear and inaccurately said that I had nothing to say about Ammons (in general I don't - had never heard of him before) where in fact I had just complained about his aimless poetry as quoted by the LRB, which counts as saying something about him.

Regarding this issue, we never discussed 'Adam Phillips on Misogyny'.

Probably a good thing. I finally attempted it again yesterday and gave up. It didn't really seem to be talking about anything I could recognize as misogyny.

Well it's a review of a book about misogyny understood as a structural/political phenomenon - or so I understand from the review, which admittedly does go on in typical LRB fashion for six paragraphs about his own experiences as a psychotherapist before informing us the book is "usefully and tellingly sceptical of all such ‘psychological’ explanations".

yes i saw a *lot* of eyerolling on twitter when ppl there saw who was writing the misogyny review

Some writers bring a personal energy that is a relief from the house style: Ian Penman, Terry Castle off the top of my head, neither appears very often (altho TC used to). Lockwood maybe too much so.

Ledge: yes, precisely, the review seemed to spend most of the time at cross purposes to the book. I gave up. It didn't make me feel positive about Freudian thought.

A fairly distinctive and also entertaining writer who used to be in the LRB a lot, now isn't: Ian Sansom.

The current LRB, in terms of number of named contributors, appears to be 50/50 male / female. I wonder if this is the first time that has happened.

To add a little to the Ammons and Sextus discussion: in both cases — I think this is also more or less what PF is saying — I think the issue is that the topic at issue is potentially interesting, but that neither reviewer really makes the case well. But in both cases, I don’t quite agree with pf’s diagnosis.

I had heard off Ammons, and even read a little — though I’d forgotten this. I’m no kind of an expert in recent US poetry — but I have read several of Harold Bloom’s tracts on poetry as whole, in particular his wild-style psychokabbalistic trilogy, The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, and Agon. Ammons features in all three, as the most recent in the specific line of strong poets that Bloom is establishing, a figure (he proposes in the early 70s) who will still being read, and still be inspiring and troubling poets in 20 or 40 or 100 years, casting the kind of spell that these future poets will be fighting their way out of, their first the poetry they are then making. A fragment from ‘The City Limits’ (“the guiltiest / swervings of the weaving heart”) form the epigraph to Anxiety of Influence, in fact, which is surely an indication what high regard Bloom holds him in.

And Matthew Bevis mentions this regard — and remarks on how astonishing Bloom’s essays on him are — but then says nothing more about them. And he starts his review (fatally, really, in terms of contentful critique) with a justification that amounts to “Ammons is important because important people say he’s important”, before veering off into a readable but (in terms of justification) irrelevant column of backstory. Biography may well illuminate the poems, but it isn’t what makes them any good.

Then Bevis quotes Helen Vendler, saying Ammons is “the first American poet to whom the discourse of the basic sciences was entirely natural” — which seems a promising enough line of potential justification, except it’s instantly abandoned and never returned to. And by column three we’re off into a welter of ways to associate the poetry with uncertainty, indifference, reserve, a mannerist will to a seeming ordinariness. And we speed past Bloom’s claims to arrive at the long reaches of makeweight stuff that apparently fill this Complete Poems. Which I guess as a reviewer he does have to tackle, except he (a) wants to place them at the centre and (b) doesn’t then seem to want to counterpose them with or work them into Bloom’s arguments about strong poets and strong poetry (or Vendler’s about science). To me, better editing would dig right into this apparent clash, because I think it’s the core of this review — Ammons’ own swerve away from the strong poetry of Bloom’s strong claims for Ammons as strong poet. As it is, all this is just skated over.

So when PF says aimlessness, I don’t quite agree: indeed the quoted line he used to exemplify this specifically contains an aim: writing just to be writing is an aim. Just not one that readers will necessarily have any patience with, if the work produced isn’t good (which Bevis seems to think — at this point — it isn’t). And yet when he gets down the the work of close-reading actual poems (three limpidly close observations of nature on the move: two about snails, a longer one about eagles and — I guess, given its title, ‘Easter Morning’ and final lines — Christian faith), the review does finally clarify into something that isn’t one writer’s pathless evasion passing under and around another’s ditto. It takes way too long to get there: the snail stuff should open the piece, with the tunnelling into Bloom right and wrong next.

__________

The Sextus review too suffers a bit from inadequate editing — though more from the writer’s style. Which I think is a problem even when he isn’t writing about sex: I was already sighing in para 2, when he says “where both the literal and cultural wonga was”. A couple of columns on he totally bludges the jokey reference and transition pun to asterisks, obelisks, Asterix and Dogmatix (which depends on the notion that no book is more full of asterisks or obelisks than Asterix the Gaul… which isn’t even true of comic books when he’s referring to grawlices and the like). And he gets Housman wrong also, I think, for the sake of a formalist gag about his sexuality: “so aware of the follies of mankind that he didn’t much like men either”…

I mean there’s something genuinely interesting to me about a classical poet so veiled in poorly transmitted versions of actual real and deliberate masked games-play that a genuinely high-end and world-class classical scholar like Housman chooses to lollop over out of his comfort zone towards straight-up Botticellian invention, to fill in some lost lines (if that’s what Burrows is actually claiming, which isn’t altogether clear). This is where this piece should start — except if it did, I think the glibness count would be way worse.

Anyway, what I’d like to see more of in this essay is the connections between contested translations of corrupted manuscripts, projection from the present into ambiguous classical texts, and transformative moments in poetry and culture (Petrarch and Renaissance humanism; Pound and literary modernism). And also (in re these same issues) the question of poets who change with the political wind, as Propertius and Pound both did. The pun we want centred is “corruption”, not asterisk — and the ways corruptions at either end pull towards one another, for ill or good.

lol speaking of editing: "I think the issue is that the topic at issue"

oh ffs: "their first the poetry they are then making" = "their fight the poetry they are then making" sorry i am tired from book launching and etc

I like Mark S's post. It's generous of him to refer to me and not to be too unfavourable, in such a substantial contribution of his own.

One obvious feature of his post is that it comes across as an editor's comments, writing about what contributors should do. I don't really know whether Mark S's past work as an editor has involved this kind of work with people's writing, but his post gives the impression that it has.

Some time, maybe the next ILB FAP, I would like to hear about the Cambridge HIDDEN LANDSCAPE tour.

I had indeed forgotten how much the Ammons review talks about Harold Bloom. I found this very odd. I didn't know the details of Bloom's treatment of Ammons as Mark did.

I'd also forgotten about Vendler's comment, but actually it was one that annoyed me in the review. It doesn't feel true enough to be worth saying as such a big declaration, as lots of US poets had surely been interested in science in its different forms. William Carlos Williams would seem the most obvious as he was a kind of scientist in his practical way. Eliot uses scientific language in his most famous works (a patient etherized, a catalyst ...). Pound liked to invoke science too, and I have a feeling (from a 2nd-hand recollection) that Marianne Moore was quite big on science. I suspect you could go back through the 19th century and find earlier versions. My listing these obvious names isn't impressive, others could list other names, but I think it hints that Vendler may have been misleading. And I don't recall most of the Ammons quoted in the review being very scientific anyway!

one thing i can say about my booktour to cambridge (and nowhere else yet) is that i realised it was the first time i had set foot in the town for FORTY YEARS*

*or possibly 39 but 40 sounds better and i actually genuinely can't remember or calculate

It's slightly odd that Mark S says he doesn't agree with me about Burrow on Propertius, as he seems to have very much the same kind of problem with it as me: the reviewer, who must be a middle-aged Oxford don, comes across like a guffawing public schoolboy. The lines Mark quotes show this painfully. I didn't like or trust this, but I do feel that such a problem becomes even worse when the same writer addresses sex - which happens to be a major topic of this review.

Though, again, the basic history of missing and fragmented texts, unreliable translations, etc, remains a substantial one, and Burrow knows enough about it to show us something despite his misjudgments as a writer.

I had forgotten that Cambridge was a return for you.

re burrow: you said "joshing sexual innuendo", but i think the problem is larger than that and doesn't in fact just apply to sex -- so it's only a minor disagreement, of precision of focus really

re vendler: she says discourse rather than language, which i assume is a difference with a significance, and of course she's a world-class authority on poetry so i imagine she isn't just making a silly blunder about priority here, but has a genuine point in mind, right or wrong -- however as bevis fails to expand or her explain argument, and no subsequent quotes seem to exemplify it, who knows? this is indeed something a good editor should be saying: "explain this better or leave it out"

here's a long piece by vendler on ammons: https://harpers.org/archive/2017/08/american-expansion/

it's where the vendler line is from ("Nonetheless, he was the first American poet for whom the discourse of the basic sciences was entirely natural", on p.3) and it beds the point in much better with examples. it's just much better generally, really -- and looks to me (on a v quick read) like the source of a bit too much of the (non-critical) shaping of this LRB piece :( :(

New email advert:

Spring is here, but the LRB, like cypress, pine, fir, cedar, spruce, hemlock, juniper, eucalyptus and magnolia trees, is evergreen. Which is to say that pieces and issues from a month, or a year, or a decade ago can be as riveting and unmissable as last week’s. Now you can buy back issues online and test this notion. So if you’ve misplaced an issue you wanted to read the second half of, or your dog or your husband ate pages 17-22 of the last Perry Anderson, or you’ve just realised the collection contained in your brand new LRB binders has got a couple of infuriating gaps, rejoice!