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

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

I don't think I have ever read a better critic, of anything, than Michael Wood.

Wood, like most people, reveres Empson, and would say Empson is (much) better, and that would be a fair suggestion.

Anderson is a model for non-literary English prose.

Terry Eagleton has probably influenced me more than any other writer.

Overall, aside from writers of actual literature, those three have influenced me more than anyone as a writer, insofar as I am a writer.

actually in answer to the archives query, and if empson is being suggested (as he should be), he did write a little for the LRB before his death in 1984: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/william-empson

i have looked these up and read them all at some point: i don't now remember if they're his best work or otherwise tho

paul foot's LRB pieces are generally worth digging out also: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they-could-have-had

(this just popped up on my twitter feed, i s why i thought of it)

Re: Empson - that's surely too small a selection

I think I satisfied a lot of my English literature turn with a reading of Colin Burrow archive.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/colin-burrow

For Getman Lit J.P.Stern was good.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/j.p.-stern

And Michael Wood is good in Latin American lit. I re-read an excellent piece on Juan Carlos Onetti (whose short stories have recently been translated into English)

thanks for the Burrow tip. This review of William Boyd's Bond book is a delight

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n24/colin-burrow/semi-colons-are-for-the-weak

Any interesting writers on politics? I was thinking of making my way through Patrick Cockburn but idk...Anyone more interesting on the middle East?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/patrick-cockburn

Also was thinking of any pieces on the Balkans and how the LRB might have covered it?

I really liked Mark Mazower's book on the Balkans and I've found the couple of bits of his I've read in the LRB interesting: https://www.lrb.co.uk/search-results?search=mark+mazower

Thanks!

Must go through the Anne Carson archive:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/anne-carson