London Review of Books

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 :( :(

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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)

the unsurviving novel is proust

given where the sentence comes in the book it's in, empson is kind of saying "it me, i'm proust"

je suis etc

CALL ME MADELEINE

Some days the novel reads you.