London Review of Books

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!

This is the only time I have ever seen the LRB joke about the fact that Perry Anderson writes for it at unusual length.

It was a short article (by LRB standards) and perhaps that's why it flew under the radar, but I'm pretty shocked by Edward Luttwak's thing on Japan.

I do appreciate his stance of trying to go beyond lazy political equivalences with the West, but he treats Japan's disarmament with such contempt - seeing it as purely US imperialism or Japan deciding to be lead as opposed to leading, with no reference to how much it reflected a genuine pacifist feeling amongst the population in the post-war era. He then complains that its critics, who actually belong in three distinct groups - fascists, gangsters, tories - get lumped into the same category (within the context of defending Shinzo Abe); surely in 2019 it's not hard to see how tories strenghten fascists?

He then goes on to chide South Korea for not forgiving Japan "like France forgave Germany". Seems to me you have to apologise before being forgiven - something which Germany, for all its faults, has done quite comprehensively, and something which it has been pointed out again and again Japan has never done. Even pacifist/leftist narratives about the war tend to centre on the lives lost in Japan, not the countries invaded (cf: US movies on Vietnam, natch). Instead he suggests the reason is South Korea wanting to distract from the fact that most people collaborated (as if ppl in France didn't?).

China gets in for similar treatment, with "scaremongering" tactics being used to prevent "mass tourism to Japan", which could interfere with ideological conditioning. Seems a pretty shaky statement to me, considering Chinese tourism around the world, but anyway how can you go into Sino-Japanese relations and not even mention Nanjing?

Like I'm not averse to the idea that South Korea and China might be using anti-Japanese sentiment for their own purposes, but to write an article in a Western paper that doesn't even namecheck the very real historical reasons for these sentiments is pretty galling.

Yeah, the way japanese leaders keep celebrating the lives and graves of horrendous war criminals is pretty orovocative for Koreans, Manchurians, etc.

Just noticed it's the same guy who keeps insisting Reagan would have never pushed the button in the letters section so I guess there's not much to expect.

The Colm Toibin cancer piece is genuinely terrifying and starts with the wonderfully memorable sentence: “It all started with my balls.”

Terrifying indeed, and written beautifully.

For a few days I comforted myself by pretending that, because of my abiding interest in the mysteries and niceties of Being, I had to see an ontologist. Nobody except one of my fellow Irish novelists thought this was funny.

Yeah, I loved that piece. Am planning to ask people if there was a big crowd there whenever they tell me they went to something now.

london review of LOL

Our event with Terry Eagleton on HUMOUR on 10 June is nearly sold out - last few tickets available here: https://t.co/xwReBVT2JC pic.twitter.com/L7YbWi7QqA

— LRB Bookshop (@LRBbookshop) May 19, 2019

Thanks for the link - going to this with my partner now

I also go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1cVl7KHsGA

what's the deal with theory *slapbass flourish*

you-know-who is blogging GoT: i am reaching for a lanchester/lannister joke but luckily someone just rolled me out of the moon door

he has also watched some other TV shows

Do you go to TE's Humour bash Mark S ?

I dug "you know nothing, john lanchester" from a while back

what language is the pinefox now posting in before he reaches for babelfish?

(i'm out of town that day i think, in hastings with my sister)

To be fair, that Lanchester piece seemed fine. I have never seen GoT, so I may well not know what I'm talking about.

Mark S I learned it from my friend R J G

The GOT piece is fine. I liked the "Tony Blair or Ladyhitler" line. But even when he's OTM, he's a bit muddy. It's not so much "John, you took the words out of mouth" as "John, you took the words out of my mouth, added some syllables, and made them a tiny bit less clear"

Crosspost to the a "a box of ___ every month" thread?

www.londonreviewbookbox.co.uk

Letter commissioned for the first issue:

SIR: The London Review doesn’t have, or intend to seek, an Arts Council subsidy. This means that the envious, the indolent, the mischievous must, if they wish to be damaging, take issue with the journal itself, and not with the way it is financed. Most writers believe that they are (or, given the chance, could be) terrific editors, and they are particularly contemptuous of the skills that go into producing journals from which their own works are excluded. Arts Council grants, I’ve come to see, make it all too easy for the whimper of neglect to masquerade as public-spirited dismay. The London Review won’t have to get annoyed about this kind of thing.

It will have other things to get annoyed about, but many of these can be seen as pretty well routine: the publishers will be cagey, the librarians won’t want to know, the backbiters will go on about élitism, metropolitan cliquishness, lack of compassion for the avant-garde, the sycophants will wait and see. The appalling thing about our ‘literary culture’ at the moment is that a large section of its representatives seem to get more of a kick out of seeing things collapse than they do out of seeing them survive. Sooner or later (and I would like to think that this might be the moment) they must ask themselves if they really do want another serious reviewing journal; or if, in their heart of hearts, they prefer to sit around complaining that they haven’t got one.

Ian Hamilton

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v01/n01/letters

they shd commission a letter from ilx for the whateverth issue

Thank you for your service Ian. We're gonna nationalise it now and lock all the white literary London boys now.

Astonishing letters-page controversy:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n03/christopher-norris/paul-de-mans-past

yeah i remember all that de man stuff very clearly :(

Salad days

just finally finished reading empson's seven types of ambiguity properly for the first time (only ever skipped thru bits of it before): not always crystal clear but good not bad

was a bit startled to discover it had an index, something i was convinced i had claimed that it did not here in this very thread: rereading i discover it was the pinefox who said this (his copy had an editor;s note saying not) and that i then posted a link to an on-line version which did

anyway i came to post the following line on proust as i felt it was funny and apposite, only to find i already posted it three years ago lol: "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" -- thats right william

(i can only think that three years ago i couldn't locate my physical copy, not at all an unusual situation in my house)