Book Reviews? LRB vs the failing New York Review of Books vs ... ?

Yeah, the LR is reAlly worthwhile.

Shocked into shame to discover that there is a *good poem* in the new LRB for maybe the third time in my time reading it :0
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n08/paul-batchelor/a-form-of-words

That was really...epic?

https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/molly-crabapple/

Pieces like this = the nyrb is good again

Or this:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/05/23/not-about-sex/

James Wood on Eton might at least have had entertainment or literary value. But it doesn't, really.

There is a particular strain of writing about Brexit to which the LRB quite embarrassingly gives a lot of space - a very caricatured, tiresome caricature of a tiresome thing, a ventriloquism of other people's supposed belief in Empire and British greatness.

I can believe that this critical strain has some factual basis, ie: some or many Brexit people really are like that. But as a rhetorical form it is even more exhausted than the thing it tries to caricature.

I think that a more useful approach to writing about Brexit, if one wants one, is to get at angles that are not quite so obvious (but perhaps this is obvious also), eg: the way that Brexit people are really not very pro-British at all but are multinational corporate cynics -- as has repeatedly been shown with Rees-Mogg and is (as far as I recall) probably true of Farage also.

Colin Burrow's piece on Wordsworth this week is terrific. I've never particularly cared about Wordsworth one way or another but he made me care.

Not for me! (this essay was discussed at the FAP)

Burrow knows a lot of poetry, which is good in itself, but I increasingly dislike him as a writer.

And the whole argument about 'Wordsworth's Fun', which CB largely endorses, seems utterly perverse - often amounting to 'WW is unwittingly funny because so solemn and bathetic', etc.

I felt he took that as a starting point in order to undermine it though! i.e. he preferred the superficially bathetic "I measured it - it was three feet wide" etc.

I don't know enough about Wordsworth, or the history of scholarship around him, to appreciate whether CB is actually saying anything particularly noteworthy about him. But it made me interested.

Same! This is mostly the line I took last night. I think if I knew more about him I might not like the details of what he was saying - which isn't just that WW is 'fun'. For instance, CB maps out WW's politics and its contours for about a 20 years period, which I liked, and then his r/ship with Milton (its useful to read his piece on Milton at the archive below: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/colin-burrow, his archive -- alot of which I've spent the past month reasing -- is a largely good primer on various middle-to-Reanaissance era poets)

The 'Wordsworth's Fun' element is (only) half the review. I was not conflating it with the other half - WW's politics - which seems basically more valid.

So I said I enjoyed Andrw O’Hagan’s piece on Lillian Ross. Well, I did. For three reasons:

A: it’s about the New Yorker, at the peak of its imperial phase (mid/late-40s) and the long languorous tumble down from that. I love stories about the old-days New Yorker, they’re almost as much the reason I’m in the job I’m in as is the NME 1977-1983. So here were more.

B: without saying it out loud — and perhaps without actually realising it — it’s also about the much-contested roots of the ‘New Journalism’, in fact and as ethos (lol “Tom Wolfe — talentless”). This too is something I’m very interested in. (Subscribe to my patreon u fucks, so I can write more stuff like this… )

C: it’s explicitly an exploration, albeit a very brief and cheekily trollish (and rather sly) one, of what makes for good journalism. So that’s three.

The first spread is largely a character sketch from someone who was “there” (exactly where and when not well back up, let alone why and how): entertaining insider stories about people you’ve half heard of, with their most composed public-facing masks removed. Her hates (good list – esp.if you know something abt these various ppl, which I mostly do)(never very sure abt george plimpton tbh), her motivations, her distrusts blah blah blah. A gesture at her actual technique, again from the angle of someone “there”, at least at one stage of the process. Blah blah Shawn’s mistress for 40 years. Important claim (important anyway, but also for O’Hagan’s purpose): “only bad writers strategise about their possible critics before they choose how to write a story.” Blah blah more abt Shawn mistress for 40 years, inc. A defence from Janet Malcolm (“pretentious”). More in-person stuff, inc.a little bit which briefly illuminates the the intellectual/anti-intellectual tension of the old-days New Yorker: the gift that founder-editor Harold Ross (no relation, Lillian — who died two years ago aged 99 — was born Rosovky) and his gathered team brought into to literary journalism a series of editorial techniques aimed at wringing the most out of this very anxious divide. The tale of the New Yorker 1925-55 at least is the tale of the encounter of old-school newspapermen (H.Ross, Thurber etc) with fancy college kids from Cornell (E.B.White) or Bryn Mawr (Katharine White) or Harvard or Yale or etc or etc.

This clash and this mode of resolution were extremely important. (This is my thesis and I’m sticking to it: more elsewhere soon, I hope.) Clash and mode are both also part of the backstory at the modern-day LRB, its strengths and its flaws. It’s entirely unsurprising that O’Hagan only mentions it subtly side-swipey, borrowing lots of the energy from the Refreshing Contrarian TakeTM, without actually stating what’s at issue, especially for him. (A point worth making re strategising about yr possible critics, since AO’H entirely elides it, is that under Ross and then Shawn, e.g. from 1925-87, every single piece published by the New Yorker went through a redoubtable and indeed remarkable battery of fact-checking, editing, restructuring and rewriting: if they’d been accepted into this process a good writer maybe didn’t even actually need to pre-strategise, bcz all these editors were doing it for them. But in fact a Good New Yorker Writer –– one whose prose passed through the process not much altered, let’s say — was almost certainly someone who’d internalised the internal editorial critique right down to nerve-level.)

So, the things AO’H admires in her: her hatreds, her rudeness, her spite, her ruthlessness. And the theory that such flaws may make someone a better reporter – which he states at the close of p1 and expands in the first column and a half of p2: the writer-and-friendship theory. “She thought like a reporter. It wasn’t her job to be loyal and it wasn’t her think to be nice.” Cue LR quote abt the kindliness that she also be present: “Her entire career was spent igoring the force of that passage” (i.e. the one quoted) Someone butthurt calling her a Delilah for what she did to her friend Hemingway: “If you ask me, there aren’t enough Delilahs.” A
And then the review of the new edition of LR’s Picture (first pub.1952) and some guff to close: from here on he really does “bring nothing” (in Chairman Alph’s cheeky phrase).

The theory is in no way original to O’Hagan. Paraphrasing since I can’t be bothered to leaf thru anything for actual quotes but here are some examples:
— Journalism is stories someone doesn’t you to tell, or else it’s public relations – ppl think Orwell said this but actually it’s Voltaire William Randolph Hearst (!)
— A journalist is always betraying someone (Janet Malcolm)
— Reporters and editors don’t have friends ( Harold Ross, from the Thurber book I think?)

There was a little ilx-type spat abt marie le conte a while back, bcz she’d enthused abt the fun of the game of inside-westminster political reporting — and some of her foes were pulling prissy moralistic faces abt how “this is what’s wrong with journalism today”. Not to defend anything else MLC has ever written (not sure I’ve even read much she’s written off-twitter and I don’t follow her on) but my feeling here was: NO, it’s good to state yr pleasures and yr motivations up-front, not least bcz it’s so easy piously to lie abt same, and pious lying doesn’t make for better reporting either. Good writing is unrelated to good character: Good reporting is unrelated to “good” motivation. ilx in unfazed by the first idea but seems leery of the second.

Less the first page (as censored by books dot google), here’s a piece Vagabonds and Outlaws written in 1981 for Harpers, by Alex Cockburn, abt good journalism and its likely motivations, about the meaning of the phrase the “duty of the press” – and against the high-minded self-regard of a great of high-end US journalism. I meant to link it ages ago when ppl were kicking Gawker as it went down. (Gawker’s position being that it is absolutely wrong for information to be cheerfully circling within media’s offices that was then routinely being withheld from the public at large…) One of the heroes in it is (of all fkn ppl lol) Derek Jameson: “I’m not defending what I’m doing, Sometimes it’s right. Sometimes it’s wrong. I don’t hold with high-falutin’ talk. I don’t claim to be pure… I’m a newspaperman. I tell stories.”

tbh I like it when this claim resurfaces: because I think it’s worth bringing back to the surface the tensions that e.g. the Ross process for a time made a creative energy of harnessing — and which the emergence of ‘New Journalism’ so-called began to pull back apart. I think as a collective processing machinery it was in fact losing its salience: the Harvard-Yale faction had bedded itself, as it was always going (for one thing, the newspapermen-bred-and-born never took good physical care of themselves: Thurber was only 66 when he died, Ross only 59).

Anyway, I will expand on some of this elsewhere shortly, but for now — arriving the final twist — the sly element of all this is how AO’H weaves himself into the praise he’s directing at LR. “I was there, she used me thus, one day I would use her likewise, that day is now come: SHE IS GREAT AND SO AM I AND FOR THE EXACT SAME REASONS.”

tl;dr: u tht my grenfell piece sucked but guess what h8rs, the fact it wound YOU up is why it’s good not bad QED and out

This argument does not even slightly fly – but it’s useful to have it out in the world, along with the praetorian guard of the assumptions he uses to convince himself. There is in my mind a VERY GOOD AND URGENT CASE INDEED to re-address the Hearst-Ross-Cockburn-Gawker thesis, for all kinds of reasons (and to wonder, also, if one of the elements that disguises its worst misuses is the ever-vexed issue of “good” writing)

(So in conclusion this piece is GOOD for making me think abt all this stuff even if its motivations are bogus and its in-person insights are placed "in question" by his behaviour on other stories QED and out)

I do actually think that AO'H's last line is quite good.

colin burrows on wordsworth: haven't gathered my thoughts yet

malcolm bull on william davies: ditto (i llke davies's tweets)

james wood on eton: intermittently mildly interesting but the second sentence strikes me as highly unlikely ("at school, everyone is 'ambitious', everyone loudly stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws") -- sorry, "everyone" is bullshit in this sentence. eton is a very big school, and NOT everyone was ambitious: i didn't go to eton but i know this for a fact and it undermines wood that he says it at all. i am historically very much niot a wood fan -- for his bad opinions and his manner of expressing them -- so it's bit too tidily pat that i can now say "lol of course he's bad, he went to eton!" i do actually slightly know one quite nice good person who went to eton but i won't name-and-shame them here, even tho some ilxors will know of their work and possibly admire it.

the macron piece, the shining path piece and the keith thomas piece were all readable enough, and probably useful

Colin S. Burrows ?

Different views:

Bull on Davies surprisingly disappointing - failed to engage with what I suspect is a strong and important argument at book length from WD. This seems a real wasted opportunity for the LRB.

Macron I think useful, yes.

Shining Path, yes well-informed at least.

Keith Thomas review quite bad - another example of a bad LRB mode, where it just starts cataloguing stuff into obvious categories.

Wood ... I like some of what he has done historically, but - as I said above! - this is poor, disappointing, tells you almost nothing that is new and worth knowing.

Surely re the 2nd sentence, while it may be true that not everyone at Eton is ambitious, it is a further, in fact bigger problem that most people do not go to Eton so 'school' for JW does not mean what it mean for the rest of us?

re ilxor going to Eton: this reminds me of Prof Carmody's tendency, 15-20 years ago, to fixate on the public school to which the founder of ILX went. (I wouldn't know what it was called.)

now i mean colin "no s" burrow and i don't understand yr joke :)

it's pitched as an "insider account" but yes, it
(a) fails to examine the how the structures "inside" might produce effects not produced at other schools (not least bcz he wasn't also an "insider" at lots of other schools!). but
(b) (which is what i was getting at) i don't actually think it's necessarily a very insightful insider account! bcz he doesn't seem to spot that his second sentence is only not nonsense if you qualify it so tightly that it becomes circular ("everyone ambitious was ambitious, including perhaps some ppl you didn't notice were ambitious")

lol robin would know the name of the scottish headmaster briefly mentioned (as oddly enough do i), and would build his CV and possibly something hew's said publicly into his critique (which i wd not attempt)

re keith thomas: i think i just enjoyed the sketch-listing of historical ways to be rude? and i will never not enjoy rediscovering what dirty DIRTY birds were the nobility in ages past cf eg also: Let's bitch about our stupid, annoying co-workers

(not really yr kind of thing PF, maybe don't click thru if you hate being disgusted?)

i agree that the reviewer merely handwaves at an idea of a larger history of respectability politics (in part by critiquing KT for not delivering same) while not really doing much more than dabbing at ditto (but as i say, the dabbing is funny stories abt sacked maids curtseying in a scornful manner etc etc so it's not all downside)

i tht the m bull article was bad and rong and i also hated it for making me fold the paper down halfway so that no one could read the offensive and indefensible headline over my shoulder

There was a little ilx-type spat abt marie le conte a while back, bcz she’d enthused abt the fun of the game of inside-westminster political reporting — and some of her foes were pulling prissy moralistic faces abt how “this is what’s wrong with journalism today”. Not to defend anything else MLC has ever written (not sure I’ve even read much she’s written off-twitter and I don’t follow her on) but my feeling here was: NO, it’s good to state yr pleasures and yr motivations up-front, not least bcz it’s so easy piously to lie abt same, and pious lying doesn’t make for better reporting either. Good writing is unrelated to good character: Good reporting is unrelated to “good” motivation. ilx in unfazed by the first idea but seems leery of the second.

Someone would need to argue MLC was a good reporter and no one was doing that (Andrew Farrell liked her but it mostly seemed to be a corrective to the male haters piling on poor MLC). I am not sure ilx is that fazed by the second idea. What's the consensus on Seymour Hersh? This recent review in the NYRB shows someone who was clearly good @ reporting, although he used dubious methods and he isn't someone who had the best of intentions.

I liked the Keith Thomas review, and that it had criticisms - purely to see what this would look like - even if it did operate as an afterthought.

This one's from the failing (maybe not so much any more?) NY Review of Books, but the Marilynne Robinson piece on the Puritans was very good.

the despard story in the current issue is interesting and good: i knew it already in outline bcz it's in "the making of the english working class" -- but that great (and large) book does overlook almost the entire atlantic-caribbean dimension of the full story, which linebaugh's current book (with its v long title)* seemingly somewhat puts right

(i think i knew kate despard was black? it somehow reminds me of the fact that long john silver's off-page wife is black, and that there was a significant wing of pirate culture that was in certain ways very forward-looking culturally and politically: the linebaugh-rediker line in other words, and the masterless vessel as the root of constitutionalism -- viz the pirates who, when they took slaveships, freed the slaves, allowing those who wished to become pirates) (the bad wing of pirate culture did not do this obv)

(and probably not enough work done on how the linebaugh-rediker line has since distorted in the US towards libertarianism and even sovereign citizenship -- i have a very glib little book that explains how pirates were the original sea-steaders lol)

*Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Culture, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class and of Kate and Ned Despard by Peter Linebaugh

Good to see Elisa Gabbert in the new LRB. They are expanding what they review and who reviews. Hopefully they can give Adam Mars-Jones less work.

So, I got to review Andrea Lawlor's very fun and good novel PAUL TAKES THE FORM OF A MORTAL GIRL for the @LRB, and they gave it the best of all possible titles: https://t.co/MJKkr1OWQk

— Elisa Gabbert (@egabbert) July 24, 2019

Mark S reminds me of a remarkable thing -- I read the Despard essay while at Trinity College Dublin last week (and am surprised to learn that Irish suffragist Charlotte Despard was a distant relation by marriage if anything - no family connexions are advertised between them) --

and came back to London and on Sunday night watched POLDARK

and was amazed to find that Edward Despard is now a major character in POLDARK! He is a 'good' character, heroic; Poldark is heroically trying to help him. (His wife is included.)

https://poldarkbbc.fandom.com/wiki/Edward_Despard

https://www.bustle.com/p/who-is-vincent-regan-poldarks-edward-despard-boasts-impressive-film-tv-resume-18184929

good work poldark!

https://i.imgur.com/upu1dHJ.png

(still no sign of my letter they said they were considering publishing)

xxp I thought that Despard essay was excellent, and he was a fascinating character

In NYC for 2-3 days I tried to find a copy of the NYRB. I walked up and down Manhattan. I looked all over town. No sign! Ridiculous!

I bought the New Yorker instead, at Pennsylvania Station. And I finished it! All of it!

I came to New Haven and at last in an independent bookstore found an NYRB. It's the same one with the Fintan O'Toole essay people have mentioned.

I needed something hefty to read while off-duty etc and it fits that quantity bill OK - while costing $9.50, which is now about 8 quid - but is it very interesting?

One basic problem is that it reviews some of the same books as the LRB, so I'm familiar with them already (I already spent all that time reading about Harper Lee and that trial!), though certainly different positions may emerge.

It has a big essay making the case against war with Iran. This possibly exemplifies an aspect of the NYRB? -- it's written on the basis of existing US interests in the Middle East as legitimate; it takes the status quo as normative; it carefully apportions blame to the US and Iran, while certainly cautioning against Trump's administration and the risks of war.

The idea that for the US to contemplate starting a war with, even invading, a country 7,000 miles away, where it has no business interfering whatsoever, is criminal, disgusting, Orwellian in the bad sense, an insane moral obscenity -- this isn't really contemplated.

I think the LRB would be somewhat more clear-headed on such an issue.

From the author bios:

He was National Security Council Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa from 2011 to 2012.

He was National Security Council Director for ­Political-Military Affairs, Middle East and North Africa, from 2011 to 2013.


I think the NYRB doesn’t have a very consistent political perspective. It varies from author to author. They range from moderate left to left. They used to publish folks like Gore Vidal on US foreign policy.

yeah their politics are completely incoherent

odd glaring solecism in seamus perry’s review of geoffrey hill:

Its sheer miscellaneousness somehow mitigates against the political response it otherwise appears to provoke..

I was just finishing that essay and was going to post how much I disliked it. Everything he quotes from Hill, certainly from the new book, is rubbish - flatulent self-indulgent jottings. And he gives it space and respect and acts like it's significant poetry and worthwhile ideas.

One problem here is a very widespread tendency, that it's hard not to join, to quote poetry's statements about itself (so you write about MacNeice being 'incorrigibly plural') - and to make your whole discussion about content, about ideas, but not seriously address the fact that this is poetry, not prose. (Maybe Hill's is prose - so why treat it with the special dignity of poetry?)

Another problem, I feel, is a tacit sexism - an old male like Hill can get away with turning out this crap and it gets analysed as a serious contribution. I don't think that a woman would get the same treatment so readily, except maybe in a very deliberately feminist context. I think it's useful to think about how Hill's dross would be treated if it were produced by someone else, as this helps to show how little patience you'd have for it in another context.

I wrote some more on Andrew O'Hagan and Lillian Ross and Tom Wolfe, but you'll have to subscribe to my patreon to read it lol: https://www.patreon.com/posts/intimations-of-29855762

(subscribe to my patreon)

So, in addition to their terrible politics in relation to women and people of colour more generally, called out beautifully by @ziahaiderrahman it turns out that the London Review of Books has refused to publish a review of Insurgent Empire despite multiple people pitching it.

— Priyamvada Gopal, Uppity Esquire (@PriyamvadaGopal) September 11, 2019

I've pitched things to the LRB. They ignored me. I didn't go on social media and say they had violated my inalienable right to be published in their pages.

If you publish a statement calling a publication 'structurally racist and misogynist', why do you think they will want to have anything to do with you? And if that's what you really think of them, then why do you want anything to do with them?

Well its this and I can well believe it.

This is a very *deliberate* decision (there's more and worse but I can't really reveal it yet).

lol wrong formatting (that's a quote from the thread).

i'm interested how you square yr point on the hill piece -- which i think is a poorly structured mess with some half-explored ideas abt the politics of poetry studded here and there in it* -- with yr point abt the stance that gopal is taking

if it's the case (as you appear to concede) that the LRB could be called structurally sexist (viz that it will publish seamus perry at length on geoffrey hill's minor jottings when it would never do the same for a woman), how shd women respond? yr saying "well why don't they just walk away? why do they care?"

but gopal answers this: she's arguing something like "we don't WANT to walk away and sulk, we want to engage and encourage the platform to improve -- but there comes a time when you realise it isn't doing so!" they care because they want the respectful attention accorded to others, which they believe is withheld not for malicious or bigoted but for "structural" reasons; which is to say reasons that can be addressed, if and when more widely recognised. she has been arguing for a while now that similar issues (and worse) exist within academia

obviously she's not just talking about sexism in her case -- and perhaps it's tactically nagl to move to the new stance over the response to ignore yr own book, tho it is the kind of thing that crystallises into a final straw! but if you want to change such structures you have to start somewhere…

*i'm interested in hill and some of the points touched on (difficulty and democracy, for example) even when i think the anti-pop-culture stuff is mostly fairly dumb

Well just seen this. Some reflection that they must do better:

A statement: pic.twitter.com/q1idsIda4c

— London Review of Books (@LRB) September 12, 2019

More in regards to the 40th anniversary but intersects with what Gopal and others over the years have talked about.

For an org that reviews and has writers that look at progressive politics* it's incredibly tone deaf from them, and that's being charitable.

* Let's recall Pankaj Mishra's attack on Niall Ferguson's pro-Empire book. If they publish that why can't they publish Gopal?

Gopal has a very good and valid point, not sure whether that's the reason for no review for her own book. Hardly any books actually get reviewed in the LRB, compared to the number published that would theoretically be in their wheelhouse, and of those that do the review sometimes doesn't turn up until a year or two after publication.

Mark: I was quite struck by your ingenious parallel between the two issues / posts, but I think they are basically different.

Unlike me, Dr Gopal appears to be seeking a veto over LRB editorial policy, on pain of blackmail, ie: if they don't do what she want, she will publish polemical attacks on them whose tone would be libellous if applied to any individual more wholesome than Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

We discussed this issue very extensively at an ILB FAP (with Tim and xyzz). If we assume that the LRB is effectively a private company, funded by individuals' money and by the re-investment of sales and advertising, then it is not appropriate for an individual who is not an employee or does not have a financial stake in this entity to try to exercise a veto over what it does or does not choose to publish.

The case would be different, in my view, for any public body eg: a local council, NHS trust, police station, or indeed possibly eg: Arts Council, South Bank, BFI, where it can be argued that these are state bodies that must be transparent and accountable to the public in decision-making. I think this would apply to the LRB also if it were nationalised under Prime Minister Pidcock.

In the FAP discussion I noted that if the LRB is still in receipt of Arts Council funding then this could complicate the situation.

More simply, for any author to publish a statement that 'Magazine X has a duty to review my important book' is inherently preposterous and offensive.

IIRC my position in that discussion was to agree that a private individual can't have a veto over the behaviour of a privately-owned operation, but that same private individual has every right to hold, and express, an opinion about the way that privately-owned operation behaves.

More simply, criticising an editorial policy is not the same as exercising a veto over that editorial policy.

Yes - I think that's right.

But I think that demanding that a magazine reviews your book, and expressing outrage when they don't, tends to cross from the one thing that we think is OK, to the other thing that we don't.

there's nothing *wrong* with it -- it's just petulant and childish

typical author stuff really