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

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.

hah each to their own!

penman in the lrb -- tho perhaps not the best penman -- is better than all three :) and ditto patricia lockwood (tho i know pinefox doesn't like her and she does a very different kind of writing)

eagleton's self-satisfaction isn't really the problem, it's that they routinely let him comment in passing on matters pop cultural, which he is always then incredibly wrong about. i also find his misdirectons on theorists he disapproves of extremely iffy. he is to his credit an admirably lucid writer tho (it's just that his lucidity is sometimes used for iffy ends)

the problem with wood is as chairman alph says that he's more or less the *only* routine voice they have on film (notes-to-self run-off is a good mode! tho i do it better)

penman sucks ass imo

though admittedly i haven't read a word he's written since his racist prince essay

yes in general he doesn't in fact

(i still haven't read that essay tho)

idk if i can bring myself to value any other ideas or sentences by someone who wrote something that bad

a piece that was wildly celebrated by fans of his writing incidentally. not for me i guess!

well i can't strip 40 years of reading him out of my own critical dna so i'm starting at the wrong end for persuading you

42, jesus

actually brad yr lovely piece on 80s van morrison -- the one that finally gave me a landing point to get VM and like him rather than just be puzzled and alienated by everyone's veneration -- was very penmanish to me (and i'm not saying this just to troll you -- or not entirely anyway: it worked on me the same way his piece on MOR-era scott walker did (but that was in the wire not the lrb)

oh thank you! i totally take that as a compliment bc it's very obvious penman is talented, even though i also don't like that scott walker piece lol

Re: film in the LRB - David Thomson sometimes gets to write a review of a movie star biog there, and even late, self-regarding and p lazy Thomson is better than Michael Wood imho - DT still has insightful things to say about acting and old school Hollywood, and his recentish piece about 'Vertigo after Weinstein' seemed like a noble attempt at a self-critique for past reviewing sins and sexism.

Actually, I think it would do Penman good to write about films more and music less.

some of my sensitivity about penman may be that our approaches to artist catalogues are very similar but he doesn't go far enough and feels he has to maintain some kind of bullshit evenhanded critical distance, which leads to a lot of the bad ideas that prevail through the prince piece even before the racist stuff starts

Bennett on Larkin

sorry: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n06/alan-bennett/alas!-deceived