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

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

wrt diversity, does the LRB still advertise for staff/interns only in its own pages? it used to. And does it still receive a grants form the Arts Council?

I put this on the poetry thread but worth mentioning that the LRB archives are currently open, until (I think) the end of January.

Has anyone got any recommendations? I enjoyed this Michael Wood piece on ghosts: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n01/michael-wood/icicles-by-cynthia

low-hanging i guess (weird dinosaur biz) -- and also in the current issue rather than the archives -- but i enjoyed this: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n01/francis-gooding/hell-pigs

some pieces i bookmarked for reasons i can no longer remember despite the fact that i read them in the last few months

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n07/donald-mackenzie/how-to-solve-the-puzzle
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n13/john-lanchester/after-the-fall
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/patricia-lockwood/malfunctioning-sex-robot
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n18/tom-crewe/here-was-a-plague
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n24/owen-bennett-jones/can-t-afford-to-tell-the-truth

lanchester bookmarked but unread, u hate to see it

i read em all! i just forgot what they said!

Anything by Amia Srinivasan
https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/amia-srinivasan
but especially her tour de force on octopuses
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-sucker-the-sucker
and her piece on incels and their horribleness
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex

Patricia Lockwood on John Updike is a treat.

I've read a ton of archive pieces when I used to have a subs so entered a bit of a block with the archive opening even though my interests have widened a bit more in English Lit. I will look at Helen Vendler on Hopkins! (as per the poetry thread)

From 2016, when I went to a smouldering golf course and imagined everything going on fire: https://t.co/KozzDDekN5

— Karl Whitney (@karlwhitney) January 8, 2020

Almost anything by Michael Wood is better than almost anything by anyone else.

Except Perry Anderson.

counterpoint: Wood is unbearable, particularly when writing about film

tbf perry writing abt film wd certainly be worse, luckily he hasn't heard of cinema as we proved in an earlier episode

Lol Wood being almost their sole film critic is such a nobody fucking cares move from the LRB. Give it to Perry, please, do something anything.

i have always kind of assumed it's michael wood the TV historian with tight jeans but it's michael wood the US-based (tho UK-born) literary academic (with a sideline in film crit)

it always reads as what it is: notes-to-self run-off abt movies he's watched in the course of his more focused academic work, to clear his mind's decks (they shd give it to me, my "work" is also mainly notes-to-self run-off, and LRB wd prob pay me better than twitter and ilx do)

i *never* clear my mind's decks tho, they are awash with foam and jellyfish

You're all wrong.

Except that PA on film would be entertaining. In a way. But PA on film already exists - 'The quality of the Russian cinema in the 2000s attained a nadir unprecedented since the death of Protazanov', etc.

This is interesting on a day when people are making silly comparisons with Meghan Markle

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they-could-have-had

xp Wood and Eagleton are the worst IMO, insufferably self-satisfied. PA is that too of, course, but he has the heft to bring it off, somehow.

The 3 best writers in the LRB.