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

dissipated or in fact gradually became bad not good -- which is an argument JT might indeed have made, tho i think it wd be a sour place to make it and despite being joint editors of CL at that time orr and moore are not merely interchangeable

(disclaimer: i delivered review copy to jenny during this time and remember its travails fondly, its surprisingly large office was in curtain road)

Email from LRB shop concludes:

"The paper itself will, for now, continue to be published."

1: Colin Burrow's 'Fiction and the Age of Lies' is like an exemplar of the things that people here have been saying is bad about the LRB for ages. I'm surprised no-one here has mentioned this.

i can't tell what might be bad about this piece because my eyes glazed over before the end of the first column.

i read it while trapped in a hospital waiting room so i actually finished it: at the time i found some of it was p interesting tho i'd have to look back to see what (it is overlong)

re that Age of Lies article, for once I would say I would like to see XYZZ's view on it -- as he knows, I usually diametrically disagree with him on these things but this time we might just be in accord.

(But more likely he would perversely find a way of approving of it.)

Haha I will read it later. The piece on the Japanese Royal family is the first thing I have read from the LRB in a while.

meanwhile more ppl need to be contributing to this thread: being a record, week-on-week, of the astounding digressive fragment detail or item which sets each issue of the LRB apart from any other publication, similar or elsewise

as much as anything it's a memoir of shared work-time and (very intense) life in the city limits editorial office in the late 80s, which is i think a little different from encounters on a message board, however joyful?

I actually can't really endorse this defence - that would be a very worthwhile article, but this is actually not very much about that. It's mostly self-indulgence and passive-aggressive self-promotional whingeing, an unfortunate aspect of Turner.

to be fair to me (the best kind of fair) my declaration of investedness and hence distortion of response is contained in my second sentence

I've been enjoying the "Pandemic Journal" dispatches in NYRB. This is a good one about being on literal coronavirus lockdown:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/04/06/pandemic-journal-april-6-12/#longworth

tfw you tweet something p sour abt the buruma affair to a twitter pal and one of the signatories of the open letter protesting it (who i entirely forgot follows my twitter pal) faves yr tweet

maybe bcz they now regret signing? or bcz skullduggery in gathering said signatories? anyway they didn't sign the stupid harpers letter (tho naturally buruma did)

pssst...The New York Review of Books (@nybooks) has a new website. To celebrate, the full site (including the archive of 50+ years of articles), is unpaywalled from now until Nov. 3! https://t.co/cjeZB9HPLe pic.twitter.com/rzoKcAG6zo

— NYRB Classics (@nyrbclassics) October 19, 2020

Moderately distressed to find that the mention of me in the NYRB didn’t make it to the site because it was in a little call-out box rather than the main article :(

The website is beautiful.

Started reading a few pieces last night. I didn't realize Empson wrote a couple of pieces for them including an exhausting review of a book on Donne by John Carey.

having a look now. will definitely “do the donne” but please post any good articles people itt find during the free period. (i get access via an institution normally but don’t make anywhere near enough use of it, so re ups for old pieces gratefully received as well)

gonna send an email congratulating them on the new website but complaining about the lack of tim tbf.

classic empson letter

The first thing we need to recognize, because modern Christianity goes to extreme lengths to hush it up, is that the moral character of God had become very hard to defend, and that this was widely known, by the time Calvin and Luther had followed Aquinas.

The chief new defense invented for God is that he intends to resign, and will do so as soon as he conscientiously can, as soon as a workable alternative to his rule has been prepared.

also the review (of a Raymond Williams book on cultural vocabulary, that starts

The book is continually interesting; never more so, from my point of view, than when it is plainly wrong; but it is usually right, I could not deny.

love the way he starts from the position that any book reads is in likelihood wrong. always looking of course to pick an argument with a book.

Part of the gloom, I think, comes from a theory which makes our minds feebler than they are—than they have to be, if they are to go through their usual performance with language. The entry on the word interest is a good example. Our modern uses of the word, he explains, derive from capitalist procedures, and at first ranged from “compensation for loss” to “investment with a right or share.” In medieval times, usury was forbidden, but compensation was allowed, so there could be a gradual development of capitalist practices; interest in the modern financial sense had arrived by the end of the sixteenth century. But the “subjective” use, for curiosity or attention, is not clear before the nineteenth century:

The question is whether this sense of an object generating such interest is related to the active sense of interest—of money generating money…. It seems probable that this now central word for attention, attraction and concern is saturated with the experience of a society based upon money relationships.

I went straight for some Helen Vendler but would absolutely welcome recommendations.

I did not know that Michael Wood wrote the original review of Gravity's Rainbow! https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/03/22/rocketing-to-the-apocalypse/

thse guys also have their lore

time to ilx it up imo

Will fuck about with The Charles Rosen archive:

https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/charles-rosen/

donne piece contains a section of pure Empson, arguing a controversial textual reading via dramatising an imaginary but commonplace scene (he does this with Shakespeare a few times):

Whereas, if we look at the matter the other way round, every step is intelligible. One evening around 1600 Donne’s boss, the lord keeper, was giving a dinner party for some other top legal figures and invited his secretary to read them a few of his poems afterward, before the music. Donne felt that this poem, put among some more romantic ones, would suit the old buffers very well, so long as the point of it was left out; as a porner they would like it, but they would feel positively insulted if told that the affair was innocent. So, while dressing for dinner and considering what to read, he drew a line through due to and wrote “much less” over the top, merely to remind himself on the occasion. He could speak these words so as to sound encouraging and conniving, though they might look bad to a reader; he had no intention of altering his poem permanently. Maybe he crossed out the addition next morning, leaving a complete bafflement for the copyists.


it makes you gurgle at the effrontery and audacity of it, almost trolling, and the thing of it is, that i think his reading is (must be actually) the right one, which reverse engineering from that conclusion means he may well not be wrong in his scene (or if not the scene, the motivation for the emendation).

couple from the archive: pieces by john gregory dunne on policing in LA, written just after the king beating but before the uprising

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1991/10/10/law-disorder-in-los-angeles/
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1991/10/24/law-and-disorder-in-la-part-two/

also everything by freeman dyson is at least good fun, if not better

https://www.nybooks.com/search/?size=n_10_n&filters%5B0%5D%5Bfield%5D=author&filters%5B0%5D%5Bvalues%5D%5B0%5D=Freeman%20Dyson&filters%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=all

this was true of lots of people who wrote for the nyrb but most notable to me in dyson, perhaps because he lived so long -- the fucking ground they covered was just incredible. dyson would be like 'this one time i was having beers with niels bohr and enrico fermi . . .' yes please tell me everything about your personal interactions with a guy who won his nobel 90 years ago

Ha, I just dipped into his review of the James Gleick Newton biography and

“We knew that the fat young man was second in command to Sir Oswald Moseley in the British Union of Fascists, and if his friend Adolf had successfully invaded England he would probably have been our Gauleiter. Being well-brought-up English children, we listened to the fat young man politely and never showed him our contempt.

When I was bringing in the harvest and listening to the fat young man, I did not know that he had been the owner of the Newton papers. I learned this two years later from the economist John Maynard Keynes.”

Lmao perfect

lol

Even as a long-term fan, I was beginning to find Patricia Lockwood insufferable in the LRB, but her piece on Nabokov in the new issue is simply delightful.

I ended up sorta logging boring reactions to my read of the Charles Rosen archive (with links to the relevant pieces)

Terrific piece on Burton and 17th century prose, time to chase protestants:https://t.co/tMURjGOVXR

— non consumiamo marx (@xyzzzz__) October 26, 2020

Are you still able to read NYRB pieces? For some reason I can't log on..

Is it really the “New York Review of Each Other’s Books”?

short answer: yes

Oh my God? https://t.co/cMhQTen7ne pic.twitter.com/7b8yYqnz7p

— Brandon (@blgtylr) May 20, 2023

🙃🙃🙃